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By asking, and planning to ask, quality questions we require learners to provide responses that force them to practice using their higher order thinking skills. By targeting and differentiating the questions we ask of certain learners we can tease out knowledge, clarify thinking and address misconceptions.
Getting started with designing effective questions
Ask students to explain their reasoning for a multiple choice answer and explain why the other answers are incorrect. Ask students to compare and contrast situations, cases, ideas, people, or objects. Ask students to explain how to do something.
Teachers ask recap questions and students review and add to their notes. Students stop and track their own questions during learning activities or after a question is posed. Students pose questions to each other and respond to teacher questions in chalk talks and written conversations with a peer or small group.
Questioning techniques is important because it can stimulate learning, develop the potential of students to think, drive to clear ideas, stir the imagination, and incentive to act. It is also one of the ways teachers help students develop their knowledge more effectively.
Asking Questions Effectively
By using the right questions in a particular situation, you can improve a whole range of communications skills. For example, you can gather better information and learn more, you can build stronger relationships, manage people more effectively, and help others to learn too.
Questioning techniques – a set of methods used by teachers when asking questions, such as wait time and bounce. Experienced teachers recognise the power of questions. When skilfully delivered, questions boost student engagement, improve understanding and promote critical thinking.
research shows that questioning is popular as a teaching method and technique and that classroom teachers spend about half of their teaching time asking questions. these questions range from low-level cognitive to high-level cognitive ones, which require the students to use high order thinking skills.
Students must be given attention and be individually challenged in their education, to develop a questioning mind. It is not just about knowledge transitioning a large lecture; it is about being questioned by your teachers and peers, and having them engage in challenging discussions.
Let the other person do the talking: o Be quiet and actively encourage the other person to talk; promote their willingness to communicate; o Avoid interrupting; o Avoid pre-judging what’s being said (rather, make sure you focus on understanding precisely what the speaker means);
In terms of question type, Highly Effective Questioning instructs teachers to think of questions in terms of the cognitive acts elicited from the student. Teachers sometimes confuse the cognitive act required to answer a question with the actual answer to the question, and consider them to be one and the same.
Examples of Clarifying Questions: Is this what you said…? What resources were used for the project? Did I hear you say…?