Blog Post 4

What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher?

Asking questions in the classroom is very important but how do you go about asking a question so that every student can benefit from it? Many teachers can be enabling children from learning on how they ask questions in their classroom. As a teacher it can be easy to get caught up in a lesson and you begin to ask questions like, "Does everyone understand"? This type of question is not focused on an individual student but rather the entire class as a whole and most likely questions like this provide no useful feedback. This type of question is generally used to make sure that you may continue on with the lesson, however, many students may not speak up and inform you that they do not understand. So instead of addressing the class as a whole, begin to focus on the individual student. Make sure that you are not calling on the same person over and over again, mix it up and have the students prepared to answer a specific question. When asking a question you should address it to the entire class so that everyone can be thinking of an answer. Then immediately after the question has been asked, pause for a brief moment while you scroll the classroom for someone to call on to answer the question. By taking this approach to asking questions you are becoming more productive by getting the entire class involved and also you are decreasing the amount of students who usually don't pay attention. If you use this method, your students are more likely to be actively involved with the discussion so that if and when they get called on to answer a question, they can do so properly.

So now that we know the proper way to ask a question, lets talk about after the question has been asked and the student begins to answer the question. First and foremost, you should always allow the student to finish what they are trying to say. Try and not interrupt the student, save your comments until after the student has finished answering, then you can tell them why or why not it was correct. Also a great way to get the whole class involved with asking and answering questions is to encourage your students to communicate with one another and to gather different viewpoints from their peers. If more teachers adapted this type of questioning and answering, the outcome of how the children learn and interact with one another would, without a doubt, increase.