There are few better experiences as a teacher than when pupils ask interesting and meaningful questions about the lesson: the kind of questions that show they are genuinely engaged with the subject and that they want to know more.
The problem is, these kinds of questions get asked so rarely. suggests that the vast majority of classroom questions are asked by teachers and that when pupils do ask questions they are almost always procedural questions.
Teachers tend to overestimate how much genuine dialogue occurs in the classroom. And when dialogue does occur, it tends to be restricted to the same small number of pupils. At that point, a conversation between them and the teacher can dominate the lesson, leaving other pupils sitting idly, waiting for it to end.
Why asking questions helps learning
It could be argued that a lack of questions from the class is not a problem. The teacher can anticipate what pupils need to know and provide the information. They are the expert in the room and control the curriculum.
However, the process of forming questions is useful to the learning process. It fits with of how pupils generate learning by selecting, organising and integrating information.
To ask a meaningful question, pupils must reflect on what they have learned, and select the relevant information they want to ask more about. They then have to organise these thoughts into a coherent question before integrating the new information they receive into their schema.
Asking questions also gives pupils the opportunity to think about what they know, and what they don’t know. Reviewing their learning and identifying gaps in knowledge helps pupils to learn more and secure what they have been taught.
Given this, how do we support pupils to ask more, and better, questions?
What does a good question look like?
Firstly, we can make sure that pupils have the knowledge they need to inform their questions. Robin Alexander has shown the .
It is not possible to ask for more information about something that you don’t know exists, or know so little about that you can’t make sense of it. This is why the commonly offered advice to start a topic by asking pupils what they want to know so often fails.
The second step is to make time for pupils to think of questions. I often see teachers say, “Does anyone have any questions? No? Good, make a start then,” with no pause for breath.
We need to create an expectation that pupils will ask questions. Give them 30 seconds to write down one question before asking them what they want to know. If nothing else, the process of having thought about the question will have helped them reflect on their learning.
Finally, we need to have a culture where asking questions is celebrated. This is not the same as welcoming a free-for-all, where pupils can deliberately disrupt a lesson by asking a string of irrelevant questions.
What it does mean is having clear and explicit expectations of when and how a question should be asked, and what a good question looks like. Teachers can then praise the pupil with an explanation of why their question was such a good one, encouraging others to do the same.
Mark Enser is a freelance writer and former HMI
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