When pondering over the questions "what questions do we ask? How do we ask?" I began to get frustrated because all I could think about are the simple questions that one would ask their students to see if they really understand the material being taught. I came across a blog post from Ben Johnson titled The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom and in this post Johnson states that the most important question is "What does a teacher asking questions of a class expect the class to learn from the questioning process?". This is an excellent question to ask one's self because how can a teacher expect certain answers from students but does not truly have an understanding of what he/she is even expecting the class to have gained in knowledge. Johnson believes that the teacher should chose students randomly to answer questions to make sure that the whole class is thinking about the question being asked. When choosing students randomly to answer questions the teacher should pause a few seconds after the question is asked to allow the class adequate time to think of an answer before picking who will answer the question.
I also came across the post Asking Questions to Improve Learning. This post gave many different ways to improve the questions being asked and how to go about asking the questions. Some of the main ways to improve learning are to remember course goals when asking questions, follow a "yes-or-no" question with another question, and make sure that questions are direct and that you are asking for specific answers.
These two posts really helped clarify how to answer the question, "What questions do we ask? How do we ask?". I learned that if the teacher takes into consideration of allowing students to have time to think about a question and then picking randomly it will better the classroom as a whole because the whole class is having to spend a few seconds thinking thinking about an answer versus daydreaming when the question is only directed to one student. I believe it is a great concept to put another question with a "yes-or-no" question because it keeps a student from just guessing an answer but allowing them to come up with an answer and being able to explain why they decided on that answer.
"...simple questions that one would ask their students to see if they really understand the material being taught. " Understand? Or have memorized?
ReplyDelete"I learned that if the teacher takes into consideration of allowing students to have time to think about a question and then picking randomly it will better the classroom as a whole because the whole class is having to spend a few seconds thinking thinking about an answer versus daydreaming when the question is only directed to one student." Awkward. Rewrite this sentence. It can be much shorter and much clearer.
"I believe it is a great concept to put another question with a "yes-or-no" question…" What about abandoning closed end questions entirely?