Dive Brief:
- Asking effective questions in a logical sequence can boost students’ curiosity, thought processes and overall learning gains on a given topic, experts say. But teachers should also be ready to break from planned questions and call an audible when needed to guide discussions in the best direction.
- While educators can develop questions to determine students’ understanding of material, they can also formulate them to scaffold learning by applying context to facts or ideas, or to model a certain mode of analysis, said Joe Lampert, executive director of the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Chicago.
- Educators also need to consider what they’re communicating implicitly through the questions they ask, said Leema Berland, chair of the department of curriculum & instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education. “Let’s see what they want to say,” she said. “That’s communicating that what you’re doing is really important, and it doesn’t have to be exactly the way I was expecting.”
Dive Insight:
A well-executed series of questions can help guide students along a path without telling them the answer, and it can also motivate students by conveying a combination of excitement and curiosity, said Lampert, who is also an associate dean and associate senior instructional professor.
“A great question is a connector between students’ prior knowledge and the new knowledge we want to engage them with,” he said. “Then it becomes a matter of aligning what our goals are in any particular segment of class with the questions we want to ask.”
Educators should keep a record of questions they’ve asked and self-reflect about how students respond, Lampert said. “Pay attention to how students are responding, both from an assessment perspective but also from a motivational perspective,” he said. “It’s helpful to have colleagues observing, and feed that back to us as another set of eyes in the room.”
As someone with a background in science education, Berland could imagine a lesson about heat transfer in which the teacher queries students about why jackets work.
If a student responded that “fuzzy jackets are warm,” the teacher could ask, “What about jackets that have a harder outside?” But she noted, “What that question is communicating is, ‘I heard you, but I want to talk about this other topic.’ You could also ask, ‘What about [fuzzy jackets] makes them warmer?’”
That tells the student you’re listening, but you’re giving less-focused guidance, Berland said, so a middle ground might be to say, “Go look at your fuzzy jacket. Let’s think about what you see and what the cold air does when it hits your jacket.” She added, “For my money, the third question would be the most powerful for supporting long-term engagement and their reasoning.”
Teachers always have to do a moment-to-moment “dance” between moving the conversation in the direction they had planned and shifting it in the direction of a student’s thinking, Berland said.
“One of the things I’ve learned is, in the case of science, if you let the kids talk enough, they will challenge each other’s ideas well,” she said. “That opens up the space without the teacher saying, ‘No, I want to talk about it this way.’ ”
Figuring out the precise question to ask at any given moment can be tricky, depends upon the specific goal and requires thoughtfulness, Lampert said.
“Especially if … discussion and interaction are an important part of class, we care about not only the specific questions but also how those are sequenced over the class period, and how we adapt based,” he said.
Sometimes, the best strategy can be to make a claim or assertion and ask students to respond — and then give them plenty of time to do so, Lampert said. “Have them do free writing, discuss with a partner or in small groups, and then debrief,” he said. “You’re baking into the cake some reflection time for students so they … have processing time to generate their thoughts.”
Berland agrees that finding the exact right question depends on the goal of the discussion, and she noted that if there’s an upcoming test, the conversation can be more narrowly proscribed. But in that case, the educator might want to telegraph that the next day’s discussion will be more Socratic.
“Telling the kids what you will be looking for helps them frame it,” she said. “It also helps you, the teacher, remember what your focus is.”
