Overview of Questioning Strategies
Overview
Student involvement is essential for learning and thinking. Students must be curious enough to be motivated to interact, ask questions, collect information, organize the information and sustain involvement until they understand what is happening or a teacher is able to understand what questions, information, and or activity might facilitate their understanding. If the student and/or student/student and/or student/teacher interactions can focus and maintain student interest at the students’ developmental level, students will create new and deeper understanding. This process can and should be intrinsically motivating; creating a life long desire for learning.
Children’s learning is not just the addition of new layers to previously held ideas, but a reorganization of known ideas and/or construction of new ideas. This allows children and adults to distinguish and classify their world with the use of their ideas. To do this children and adults must ask significant questions, plan a way to answer them, and judge the accuracy of their solutions. This requires time. However, children and adults who engage in this type of learning, with meaningful content, will transfer their school learning to their everyday lives. They will be able to apply what they have learned, expand their learning, and generate new ideas.
Children and adults may be curious and desire to understand their world. However, curiosity can soon deminish without sufficient skills with respect to questioning. To become a lifelong learner you must be able to ask questions, use imaginative and creative thinking, metacognition, feel joy in wondering, be open to the usual and unknown, be skeptical, accept the ambiguity of the world, and persist with questioning in a deliberate consistent effort until a reasonable and acceptable solution makes sense.
To do this we must take time to learn how to create questions, seek answers to the questions, and learn how the questions relates to the answers we get and the meaning we expected. This can only be done in an interesting risk free environment with encouragement to practice and perfect questioning at increasingly higher levels. Young children arrive in school as novice active learners. Schools must help them to become expert active learners.
Inquiry starts with play. As students mature play can become more productive if a student’s personal interest or curiosity is sustained so that questioning continues and becomes more skillful. This is difficult for students who wait for the authority (teacher/text) to furnish problems, questions, and solutions. Not being challenged to make meaning, rather to remember the meaning of others. The good thinker realizes that while some information originated from qualified people, much information and meaning is self-generated. Good thinkers function independently, welcoming the challenge of functioning on their own. They embrace problems or the unknown, confident that they have the skill and ability to collect, organize, and understand information to achieve whatever goal they desire. One way we demonstrate to students that we value them is to ask them to think, share the processes that they use, and talk about the process. This sends a clear message that their ideas are valuable and if students are to learn with understanding, they must own and value what they do. A professional educator's job is to facilitate reasoning and understanding based on that reasoning, not to own and value what the teacher says and does.
Questions are at the level of thinking of its creator and it is the level of thinking that determines the level of the question and its answer. If a question is factual the asker wants to recall a specific fact or find a resource with the desired information. If a question is a desire to understand something, the asker must seek and process the information at a higher level depending on the the availability of information. the kind of question, and the level of understanding desired. If the kind of question relates to the level of thought, then it should be possible for teachers to facilitate student growth by monitoring and encouraging different levels of questions and guiding students to be aware of how the kinds of questions they ask relate to the kinds of solutions they arrive at. Teachers may do this by having students reflect on their actions for answering particular types of questions. This helps students see a relationship between the type of question asked and the conclusions they draw.
Questioning Assumptions
- There is a lack of knowledge.
- Curiosity, a desire to please, a desire to compete, or a desire to help can all motivate a student to ask a question.
- There is an answer.
- There is a desire for an answer.
- There is the ability to answer.
- A question must be asked to seek an answer or no answer will be achieved.
- A belief there is information and resources to answer the question.
- A question can invoke a response which may be one, all, or a combination of a mental image, linguistic or nonlinguistic information, emotional response, or physical sensation.
Questions characteristics
Each question has characteristics. The information and knowledge necessary to answer the question. A simple question such as: When did humans land on the moon? Has the characteristics: Humans landed on the moon, humans had and needed technology to land on the moon, the answer is public knowledge, and the question is answerable.
Ways to Classify questions --->>> convergent (closed) and divergent (open) dimensions of questions, effects of the question, Bloom's Taxonomy, types of question, and according to the purpose.
Creating a risk-free environment
Summary
It’s not only important for the teacher to ask questions. It is important that students learn how to ask questions to be able to learn how to learn. You can teach the techniques that you know about questioning to your students so they can learn the power of good questions. If your students are the key performers and they see how the questions you ask improve learning, they will learn how to question. If students only see teacher questions as evaluating them they will be robbed of the experience of seeing how questions are used to discover and the result will be that most will not know the pleasure of the quest for answers and the satori (joy) of discovery. To achieve this for your students you will do the following:
- Plan questions to ask.
- Provide time for questioning.
- Create a risk free atmosphere.
- Encourage students to ask questions.
- Allow students time to answer their questions.
- Discuss questions and how different kinds of questions require different processes to answer and will give diferent types of answers.
- Allow students to discuss questions with each other.
- Facilitate students as needed so they learn how to find answers to their questions.
- Model good questioning strategies.
- Facilitate students’ learning of how to ask better questions.
- Facilitate students’ learning how to processes information.
- Communicate to students the importance of good questions.
- •Be aware of students’ emotional/affective responses to different questions.
- Be aware of students’ cognitive responses to different questions.
- Be aware of students’ development of questioning strategies.
- Be aware of students’ understanding of their affective response to questions.
Robert Sweetland's Notes ©