Effective Questioning Autumn 2012

As teachers, we regularly use up to 100 questions within a sixty minute lesson. So ... don’t just sit there ........

Task – before we begin: Please reflect briefly on how much impact your questions have on your students’ learning and then give yourself a ‘score’ 1-10. Please make a note of your score by question 1 on the sheet on your table!

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10___________________________________________________________________________

Low impact High impact

A Starter!

A few ‘Range Finding Questions’!

Please refer to sheet on your table!

So ... Why do we ask questions?

1. To keep pupils on task

2. To check knowledge and understanding

3. To help diagnose pupils’ difficulties

4. To make pupils think

Ability

PRACTICE ZONE

LEARNING ZONE

Can do with encouragement

Can do automatically

Too Easy

Too Hard

PRACTICE ZONE

LEARNING ZONE

Did you know that ...... ?

• Up to 30% of students regularly reply to questions with “I don’t know!”• Students spend 90% of their time in a seated position.• On average, students talk to each other for 1.7 minutes per hour.

• The range of questions we ask tend to have following pattern:Managerial – “Who’s finished?” etc – 57%Information/data-seeking – “How many legs does a spider have?” – 35%Higher order/Thinking - “Why is a bird not an insect?” – 8% • Questions tend to be directed to our students as follows:To the whole class – 22%To individuals – 66%To groups of students – 12%

• A colleague was asked how many students he thought he had involved in a Q + A session. He estimated 25 students. The number was actually 8.

Did you know that ...... ?

• Our sequencing of questions:‘Stand alone’ questions – 53%Sequences of two or more questions – 37%Sequences of four or more questions – 10%

What does the school need to do to improve further? Increase the proportion of teaching that is good and outstanding by:

− providing additional challenge for the most-able students to support the development of higher-order thinking skills

− ensuring that teachers’ questioning engages all students and demands their active participation in lessons

February 2012

Remember Ofsted ?

A ‘question-friendly’ classroom environment?

1. Our awareness of ‘the Ghost children’!

• No hands policy?• The X-factor approach to delivering questions?• The random name selector?• Lollipop sticks?• Allocate numbers to students?

2. Remember:

‘Wait time 1’ – immediately following your question before eliciting a response

‘Wait time 2’ – immediately after receiving the response/before you follow up

A ‘question-friendly’ environment (cont/d)

3. The Look-on-your-face-factor! The Respect agenda- body language? - tone of voice?- dealing with put downs

- a question is an invitation, not an interrogation!

5. Create ‘norms’, ‘systems’, ‘rituals’, ‘habits’ in your approach to questioning?

- train the kids to recognise how we do business!

4. ‘Ping pong’ questions or ‘Basketball questions’?- building on pupil responses or simply moving on to

the next question

Our ways of working

1. Alone – listen to your teacher, quietly think, be determined to respond orally or in writing.

2. In Pairs

3. In fours

4. Whole class ‘up and about’

...and ALWAYS

• Listen carefully

• Think things through

• Respond thoughtfully

Seating – make it fit your delivery

Teacher controlled cue card passing

6. Beware of too many cheaply-bought “Brilliants!”

- 50% of answers are simply accepted without follow-up

- we tend to comment on the ‘correctness’ of the answer and move on

- isn’t massive praise for recall-level answers a bit disingenuous?

7. Kids should ask questions too!!!

-Do we build-in time for them to formulate questions?- How do we exploit kids’ questions?

Pause for thought:

1.Our awareness of the ‘Ghost Children’

2.Wait time 1 and Wait time 2

3.The ‘Look-on-your-face-factor’/Respect agenda

4.‘Ping pong’ questions or ‘Basketball’ questions

5.Creating ‘norms’, systems’, ‘rituals’

6.Beware of the cheaply-bought “Brilliants” – making students accountable for their answers

7.Kids should ask questions too

Choose one element of the question-friendly classroom that resonated with you and tell your neighbour why! You have three minutes!

Devising our questions – Climbing Bloom’s (revised) Mountain!

Skinny questions

Fat questions

Devising our questions – think about LEVELS AND VERBS!

Recall level – define, describe, label, identify, match

Comprehension level – explain, translate, illustrate, summarise

Application level – demonstrate, predict, use, apply to new context

Analysis level – analyse, infer, relate, support, break down, differentiate, explore

Recall questions test existing knowledge whereas ‘thought’ questions use old knowledge to create new knowledge and ideas. (Ted Wragg, 2001)

Evaluate/Create level – design, create, compose, assess, appraise, defend, justify

Skinny questions

Fat questions

Devising our questions – and not forgetting QUESTION STEMS:

Question stem Level – Recall? Comprehension? Application? Analysis? Evaluate/Create?

1. What is this really saying?

2. Why do you think...?

3. How can you use a spreadsheet to .?

4. Can you point to any evidence that ..?

5. Where in (the novel) would you find ..?

6. What might this symbolise?

7. Which is more important ... ?

8. Where is (the story) set?

9. How might you distinguish between..?

10. Which type of (graph) is this?

Analysis

Comprehension

Application

Analysis

Knowledge

Analysis

Evaluation

Knowledge

Analysis

Knowledge

..and how are our questions SEQUENCED?

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

..or do we engage in a random wander?

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

Do we use our questions to guide and scaffold pupils’ thinking?

As teachers, we regularly use up to 100 questions within a sixty minute lesson. So ... Hopefully you didn’t just sit there ........

Task: After having reflected further on how much impact your questions have on your students’ learning and having given yourself a ‘score’ 1-10. What might you now need to do to move your score up one notch?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10___________________________________________________________________________

Low impact High impact

And one final thought ........