Questioning; Challenge & Engagement | Gary King. Questioning is a fundamental element of pedagogy, one you could read endlessly around, but the reality is using questioning to challenge and engage all learners is demanding and potentially problematic to get right. Recently I’ve been working with a team of teachers, shaping our CPD model in preparation for the new academic year. Engaging in dialogue around teaching and learning with colleagues is always a pleasure and extremely informative, and one aspect continually crops up; deep, challenging and engaging questioning. Firstly, I think it’s crucial to outline what we are trying to achieve when we think about the purpose of questioning, for me it includes the following: Making the assumption that we are all familiar with Blooms Taxonomy; a cognitive approach to to classify forms and levels of learning, research has shown that as teachers we tend to ask questions in the “knowledge” category 80% to 90% of the time.
Active engagement Good luck with your questioning! Like this: How to Teach Critical Thinking. Robert H. Ennis, rhennis@illinois.edu The actual teaching of critical thinking is a function of many situation-specific factors: teacher style, teacher interest, teacher knowledge and understanding, class size, cultural and community backgrounds and expectations, student expectations and backgrounds, colleagues’ expectations, recent local events, the amount of time available to teachers after they have done all the other things they have to do, and teacher grasp of critical thinking, to name some major factors. I here suggest some general strategies and tactics gleaned from years of experience, research, and others’ suggestions. They are guidelines and must be adjusted to fit the actual situation. Underlying Strategies (The three underlying strategies are “Reflection, Reasons, Alternatives” (RRA): 1. 2. 3.
Fundamental Strategies 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Tactics 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Mid-level Strategies 21. Be patient, but show that you are interested in their thoughts. Questioning. The start of a new term is nearly upon us and I am going in revitalised due to a number of life changes. One aspect of getting back into the classroom and school environment is to listen to the great array of questions, challenges and responses I'll hear and be involved in. I love questioning and the potential depth to thinking it can generate. However far to often including in my own practice I prevent opportunities for taking the thinking deeper by posing a new challenge, problem to keep that engaging thrust of something new flowing in the room. This is good a trigger but like a gun firing the trigger too often at the same target can lead to the death of something. In this case deep thinking that challenges students. So how about a strategy. So what are the question Socratic circle questioning poses?
It is a 6 step process: • clarify • challenge assumption • evidence for argument • viewpoints and perspectives • implications and consequences • question the question. Twitter. Using Questioning to Stimulate Mathematical Thinking. Good questioning techniques have long being regarded as a fundamental tool of effective teachers. Unfortunately, research shows that 93% of teacher questions are "lower order" knowledge based questions focusing on recall of facts (Daines, 1986). Clearly this is not the right type of questioning to stimulate the mathematical thinking that can arise from engagement in open problems and investigations.
Many Primary teachers have already developed considerable skill in good questioning in curriculum areas such as Literacy and History and social studies, but do not transfer these skills to Mathematics. Teachers' instincts often tell them that they should use investigational mathematics more often in their teaching, but are sometimes disappointed with the outcomes when they try it. There are two common reasons for this. Types of Questions Within the context of open-ended mathematical tasks, it is useful to group questions into four main categories (Badham, 1994). 1. 2. 3. 4. 1. References. Some thoughts on questioning….. DHS drama teacher, Learning Leader and occasional blogger Lesley Graney has been thinking about questioning…… There is a lot of chat about the Big 4 in our school. It’s everywhere; if only the big 4 were sleep, cheese, red wine and Strictly Come Dancing, it would be easy for me. But no, the Big 4 are ‘Challenge’, ‘Independence’, ‘Feedback’ and ‘Questioning’.
So with this big 4 how would you rank them if 1 was most difficult and 4 the easiest ? For me it would be: Challenge - surely the most difficult with a name like that.Independence - I know we are all capable of it; we learn to walk, ride a bike, work out a new phone or in my case we don’t. So my easiest would be questioning. We started with questioning this week. I have tried to give feedback to my husband for example this evening when he said the plughole needed ‘defuzzing’ as the water is draining slow. So, back to questioning. Then actually I thought about it. Me: “How was work today?” Him: “Fine” No, I go upstairs and defuzz the bath.