Blog Post #5 - Asking Questions

Questions are the heart of learning. Without questions how would we discover or invent, much less learn? The question for this post is, what do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher? I will address three topics in order to answer this question: why do we ask questions, the type of questions to ask, and the process of asking questions.

Teachers ask questions for a variety of reasons. Teachers will often ask a question to begin a lesson, or several questions to be answered over a unit. A good teacher will ask questions throughout a lesson to check for understanding. Questions are also asked at the end of a lesson to encourage students to delve into the concept further. But the most important reason teachers ask questions is to get their students thinking.

There are several types of questions that a teacher can ask to engage their students and to encourage them to think. The first type is a closed-ended question. This type of question has a direct response that is correct or incorrect, or it has a yes or no answer. Closed-ended questions are good questions to ask to check for understanding. It is best to follow these types of questions with another question asking for an example. Another type of question is an open-ended question. Open-ended questions have multiple answers and encourage discussion in the classroom.

The process of asking questions is equally as important as the type of questions to be asked. In Maryellen Weimer's post Three Ways to Ask Better Questions in the Classroom, she emphasizes that preparing questions is the key to asking good questions. Questions will come to a teacher's mind while teaching a lesson, but it is best to think of and prepare questions when preparing the lesson. Maryellen Weimer also wrote that teachers should play with placement of questions in their lessons. Instead of asking all the questions at the end, ask a question at the beginning of class that will be answered throughout the lesson or even in the next lesson, or have students work together to come up with an answer. An article from The Teaching Center of Washington University in St. Louis, Asking Questions to Improve Learning, states that questions should be asked throughout the lesson, and questions should be specific and direct. Also, only one question at a time should be asked so that students are not confused about which question to answer. When asking a question, a teacher should wait 5-10 seconds for the students to think before accepting a response, and if no response is given, then the teacher should not answer the question but rather reword the question and ask it again. When responding to a student's answer, a teacher should encourage their students to keep thinking by following up with a question to the student to explain their thinking.

The motto for this EDM class is Questions are More Important than Answers. Questions are what drive learning and discovery. As a teacher, I must continuously ask thought provoking questions to my students while teaching, but ultimately I need to teach my students to ask thought provoking questions in order to be good learners.