The study of questioning made me consider how I use questions when I am teaching. Before the study, I believed that my questioning techniques were very good and that I provided my students with questions to develop their learning well. After looking closely at my questioning techniques during my practical experience I discovered that my questioning skills are actually quite poor. I found that I ask questions that only require my students to use the lower order thinking skills in Bloom’s Taxonomy such as remember and understand. I very rarely ask my students questions that require them to apply or analyse their knowledge and cannot think of any circumstance when I have asked my students questions that require them to evaluate or design. This informs me that my questions are not challenging my students, as they are not requiring them to think deeply. I believe that there should be a mixture of lower and higher order questions to ensure that my students succeed as well providing challenges for my students and extending their knowledge.
I find that when I am teaching on prac, it is so easy to ask lower order questions as they are the first questions that come to my mind. To ensure that I incorporate effective higher order questions in my teaching I need to plan the questions that I am going to ask before hand. I also need to know the answers that I am expecting from my students and the answers that I would like my students to produce. For example, I was teaching my Year 3 class a lesson on the topic of The Australian Government. My knowledge on this topic is extremely limited and I hadn’t prepared the answers to the questions that I was going to ask. Therefore, my students responses were very limited. As I hadn’t prepared any answers, I excepted the students answers that they provided. If i had have planned the answers before the class I could have probed my students to get them to think deeper and with my assistance produce a better answer.
Therefore the main things that I will work on when questioning in the classroom are:
- Developing higher order questions.
- Preparing questions and answers before the lesson.
Using effective questioning techniques ensures that teachers are following teaching standard 3 as they are planning and implementing effective teaching and learning.
The information provided in this blog has been informed by:
Barry, K. & King, L. (1998). Developing instructional skills. In Beginning Teaching and Beyond, (3rd ed.), (pp144-167). Social Science Press.
Carolyne's Teaching 