Blog Post 4

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

In a classroom, asking questions is one of the most important things a teacher can do for his or her students. As a teacher, you want your questions to make students think and encourage them to ask more questions and participate. In order for this to happen, you need to ask good questions, not just everyday, average questions. When preparing to write this blog post for class, we were given a few good resources to read over and get some answers. The two sources I found most helpful are The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom by Ben Johnson and Three Ways to Ask Better Questions in the Classroom by Maryellen Welmer, PhD.

One of the main purposes behind asking questions in the classroom is to check for understanding from the students This can benefit the teacher and the student. Perhaps one of the least affective question to ask to check for understanding would be, "Does everybody understand?". When a teacher asks this question, we all know that the student will most likely just answer this question with a "yes" or no response whether they actually understand or not. When you ask a yes or no question, such as this one, they know that the teacher is wanting to hear a "yes" in return or a positive response, so, that's what the student responds with. Like Ben Johnson stated in his blog, when you ask this type of question you are basically stating "This is your last chance. If you do not have question, then i assume that you understand and I can move on to the next subject. I am absolved from any lack of understanding on your part because I asked this fair question, and gave you a fair chance to answer." A problem with this is that the students may not know that they do not understand, therefore, they do not know to ask questions to help them better their understanding. The question to answer now is, how do we appropriately check for the students' understanding? We need to ask specific questions that do not require a yes or no response.

In The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom, Mr. Johnson makes another great observation. When a teacher is giving a lecture and stops to ask a question, the classroom is then divided into basically three different groups of students; the smart kids who try to answer every question, the not as smart kids who rely on the smart kids to answer, so they don't have to, and the kids who simply do not care to answer. Johnson went to numerous classrooms to observe this and saw that students usually assumed one of these roles by the fourth grade and acted accordingly in the classroom. I, for one, can understand this 100% because I was one of the students who assumed one of these roles growing up. I put myself in the group of students who were not as smart and were okay with the smart kids answering all of the questions. Looking back at my those days now, I see that I had to study much more outside of class because, by not answering or asking question in class like the smart kids, I did not learn as much as I could have and I understanding things less. Some teachers see this happening in their classrooms and are okay with it because they reason that the rest of the students are learning from the answers that the other students are giving. This can be true in some cases, but it is very rare because students who are not answering the questions are usually sighing in relief that they do not have to answer and lose interest in the question completely. Other teachers try to mix it up by trying to call on a specific students to answer the question, so the rest of the students can think about their answer, but in reality, the students are once again sighing in relief that they did not get called on. Mary buds Rowe had a simple and effective solution to this misunderstanding. Mary suggested that teachers should ask a question, pause for a few seconds to give every student in the class the chance to think about the question and of an answer, and then call on a student by name at random and sometimes more than once. By doing this, it allows the students to ponder for the answer, instead of instantly being relieved and zoning out the question all together.

Maryellen Welmer discusses some great ways to asking affective questions in Three Ways to Ask Better Questions in the Classroom. Like I mentioned earlier, a wood question can and will make a student think and anchorage them to participate and dig further for the answer than they usually would. Welmer suggested three easy ways or steps to asking successful questions. First, you should prepare your questions ahead of time. By doing this your questions can be much more clear, not only by clear wording but, also, concept-wise as well. It will give you a chance to ask yourself ahead of time if this is a question that needs to be asked, if it is relevant, and when the best time to ask this question would be. Second, you should try to play around with some questions. Questions can lose their power to encourage and engage the students as soon as it is answered. One way to prevent this would be to possibly leave a question unanswered for a while. For example, you could propose the question at the beginning of a presentation or lecture and leaving it to be answered at the end of class, giving the students plenty of time to really ponder the question and figure out an answer or even another good question of their own. Another way to play with a question would be to ask a question and allow the students to discuss amongst them and write down all of their possible answers and ideas to give to the teacher. The teacher can then discuss each possible answer's merit and detriments to ensure that every student understands why an answer is correct or incorrect. Lastly, a good method is to preserve the good questions whether they are your own questions or questions students ask in class. If you want to keep a good question fresh and relevant throughout a series of lectures on a subject, then a good way to do that is to perhaps rephrase and reword the same question and state different versions of the question in each lecture on a certain topic. Another way to do this is have the students thinking on your question while you discuss another question that was raised by another student in a different class. By doing this, it will show the students that you appreciate and value their questions and input and, possibly, encourage them to put their opinion out there. Like Maryellen stated, "The best questions a student can ask are ones we [as teachers] can not answer."

Like previously discussed, questions are very important to the classroom and learning experience. We, as teachers, need to ask questions so students can see the importance of questions.