CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT

Strategic Questioning: What every teacher needs to boost students’ learning

Last Updated 9 October 2023/ By Zineb DJOUB

What’s strategic questioning and how to use it in teaching?

Our interest as teachers is always to get well-prepared and up to the challenge that is facing us in the classroom. So, we plan for our lessons, head in to meet our expectations and support students to learn.

But, have we ever thought about planning for our questions in each lesson: thinking about and deciding the kind of questions we need to address along with the lesson’s stages and how to do that more effectively to enhance students’ learning?

Our questions can stimulate students’ critical thinking, curiosity, and desire to search and learn more. They can motivate them to voice their ideas, collaborate with each other, make decisions, and take their learning beyond the classroom walls.

To this end, we need to give more attention and concern to our questioning process to achieve more strategic questioning.

Strategic Questioning

Strategic questioning is intentional, and systematic and targets students’ learning. Within such a process, students are not just listening and answering questions, but they are also involved in analyzing their teacher’s and peer’s questions, raising more questions, taking turns to discuss each other answers, and evaluating them.

Here are some strategies that can help you enhance the strategic effectiveness of questioning.

1. Plan for your questions

Planning for your questions involves identifying the learning intention or what you are targeting. Do you want to check for understanding, for students’ prior knowledge, the development of learning strategies, etc?

So, you need to decide the purpose of your questions and then select the most appropriate type of questions for that purpose.

But, our questions can pose different cognitive demands on our students. There are those that require much thinking and time while others can be a matter of memory and recall of what has been learned.

It is important then to know how to frame our questions and decide what kind of questions we need to pose at the beginning, during, and at the end of our lessons.

Bloom’s taxonomy can assist with this.

To assess students’ knowledge and comprehension use closed questions that pose lower cognitive demands because they rely largely on memory and have one correct answer. These questions are meant to establish the core material of a unit.

You can pose your closed questions at the level of the warm-up activity (to activate prior knowledge, assess their understanding of previous lessons, etc,) while and after explaining your lessons (to check for understanding).

Application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation are assessed using open questions that pose higher cognitive demands, lead students to think for themselves, and have several correct answers. They advance students into manipulating, extending, and transforming what they have just learned.

So, raise these questions when you provide practice and promote students’ collaboration and creative productivity. (after asking knowledge and comprehension questions)

Both closed and open questions are important Assessment for Learning tools. Yet, you need to plan for more open questions than closed questions.

This is because open questions provide more opportunities for the teacher to understand the thinking behind a response and more opportunities for the students to demonstrate their understanding.

To phrase strategic and stimulating questions, teachers could make use of a number of other tools besides Bloom’s. Some of these are:

• De Bono’s Six thinking hats
The Six Thinking Hats is a strategy that encourages students to look at a topic problem or idea from more than one perspective. Each hat represents a different kind of thinking and therefore different kinds of questions.

• Wiederhold’s Question matrix
The Question matrix contains 36 question starters asking what, where, when, which, who, why and how. These questions are asked in the present, past, and future tenses, ranging from simple recall to predictions and imagination or single questions depending on the task.

• Thinker’s keys
Thinker’s Keys is a strategy to develop creative and critical thinking designed by Tony Ryan, a consultant for Gifted and Talented Programs in Queensland. Each of the 20 keys is a different question that challenges the reader to compose his or her own questions and come up with responses.

You can also get Your Guide to Effective Questioning. The guide provides you with examples of questions to address at each lesson’s stage which you can frame according to your tasks. So, it clarifies the objective of each stage and the kind of questions to address to achieve that objective. For more details click here.

2. Consider the way you pose your questions

Be aware of how you present your questions. Do you ask questions in a friendly or authoritative manner? Asking a student to explain the reason for not collaborating with his peers is not like asking him to initiate or suggest new ideas.

What is the purpose of asking questions? Do you want your students to learn from the question or are you just asking?

Your tone while uttering your questions can determine how important they are. Also, when you cue students on important points and raise questions in relation to them, you’re showing the need to get their answers.

Increase students’ participation in the questioning process. How?

Move around the room to make sure questions are more likely to be distributed. Other alternatives would be allowing students to talk to each other about a question, asking everyone to write down an answer and then reading out a selected few, or giving students a choice of possible answers and having a vote on the correct option.

Provide students with time to think after asking a question. This means accepting a pause or silence as an integral part of questioning during class.

Research suggests that, where there is a lapse of time between question and answer, more students participate in answering, responses are longer and more confident, and students comment, respond to, and thus build upon each other’s answers.

Also, pose one question at a time. Asking a string of questions, particularly without any pause, is confusing. Provide prompt questions such as ‘Why do you think that?’, ‘Can you tell me more about …?’ or ‘Is it possible that …?’

Select your questions carefully and remember: posing fewer, well-chosen questions is more strategic to support students’ learning.

3. Respond positively to students’ answers

A critical factor in enhancing strategic questioning is teacher receptiveness. The teacher’s positive response to both good and wrong answers is essential.

Your receptive, listening attitude is conveyed through your facial expression, body language, and verbal responses. These have to communicate to students’ positive feedback that motivates them to learn and make progress.

Even when the answer is not what you had expected, do not discount the effort the student has made. Your response needs to be positive. Here are some tips :

• Repeat the student’s answer while focusing on the mistake or wrong information, so that the student can correct himself immediately.

• Rephrase the original question to simplify it more ‘Let me put it another way…’.

• Use your facial expressions and gestures to support the students while answering. For instance, when there is something wrong with the student’s answer, you can raise your eyebrows, roll your eyes, etc.

• Request for clarification from the student who answered ‘What do you mean when you say …?’ ‘Could you elaborate a bit more?

• Request for specific examples ‘Can you give me an example of this?’

• Ask the student to rephrase his answer: ‘Can you put it another way?’

• Ask another student to help form the correct answer ‘Who can explain more this answer?

• Turn to the rest of the class, ask their opinions, and start debating the answer, « So, what do you think of John’s answer? Do you agree with him? Why?

There are times when we do not hear well students’ answers or understand what they want to say. So, why not hold on and take some time to get them instead of saying ‘wrong’ to the student, giving our answers, or asking the same students to do so?

Students’ answers mirror their understanding and thinking and tell a lot about how effective is our teaching. So, they deserve our ATTENTION.

When you get good answers, praise and try to congratulate specific successes, rather than offering blanket praises. For example, ‘Well done for using punctuation correctly in that passage, it’s made your sentences more effective’, instead of ‘Well done, good work’.

Praising students’ efforts is likely to make them feel worthy of attention and proud of their accomplishments. It also encourages others to work hard.

Get your students involved with the lesson, and emphasize that everyone is expected to think and be ready to answer any question. Encourage the asking of questions and make it okay to give a wrong answer. Your students will be more likely to offer answers and learn through your questions.