Blog Post #6

What Do We Need To Know About Asking Questions To Be An Effective Teacher?

In Maryellen Weimer's blog post, Three Ways to Ask Better Questions in the Classroom, there are, as stated in the title, three ways to do so. The first way is to Prepare Questions. By preparing the questions you are to ask, you are making it less confusing on yourself and your students. If you just ask your students whatever comes to mind, it might not be as clear to them as it was to you in your head. If you write out your questions beforehand, you can make them clearer and more understandable to your students, therefore you will get more participation out of them. The second way is to Play with Questions. Weimer raises a great point when she states that "As soon as the question is answered, it loses most of its power to engage students." That really is what happens, once the teacher asks a question and it's answered, the students stop thinking about it. If a teacher were to write to question on the board, tell the students to think about it, go on with the lesson for the day and then collect answers to that question at the end of class, students would be more engaged. It would get them thinking more about the possibilities of that question. The third and last way to better questions in the classroom is to Preserve Good Questions. If you have a good question and you would like to stay focused on that question, you can keep it and think of different ways to revise or reword it. Another way to preserve a good question is to write down a question a student asks that you think is a great question and use it as an example in another class. That way if you aren't having any participation from a class, you can use that example to help get things started.

On the post Asking Questions to Improve Learning, it tells us that when preparing for a class, think of specific questions that you will ask your students. That sounds a lot like what Maryellen Weimer was tell us in Three Ways to Ask Better Questions in the Classroom. We're hearing that a lot because that is what teachers need to be doing to get students to participate and to be more engaged. In Asking Questions to Improve Learning, it goes over General Strategies for asking questions. One strategy is when you plan questions, you should keep in mind the goals for your class. For example, if you would like your students to have more critical thinking skills, you should ask questions that will be more challenging and more thought provoking. A second strategy is if you ask a 'yes or no' question, you should follow it with another question so your students will go into more depth rather than a simple 'yes or no'. There are two types of questions you can ask. You can ask either closed questions or open questions. A closed question is a question that has a limited number of answers and is often more difficult. It also tests students comprehension. A open question is a question that has multiple, sometimes conflicting, answers. It encourages more active learning in the classroom.