Blog Post #4. What questions do we ask? How do we ask?

What type of questions do we need to ask our students, as teachers?

The Teaching Center states, "When you ask questions in the classroom, you are modeling a process that students can and should use themselves; encourage your students to use the following questioning strategies to assess what they have learned, to develop their thinking skills, and to study for exams." This website gives 7 general strategies for asking questions: When planning questions, keep in mind your course goals, Avoid asking "leading questions", Follow a "yes or no" question with an additional question, Aim for direct specific questions, In class discussions, do not ask more than one question at once, When you plan each class session, include notes of when you will pause to ask and answer questions, Ask a mix of different types of questions. When teachers ask students questions, they are actually increasing their learning skills. When students answer questions, they can create their own ideas about the topic. For more information on this website, you can visit the link posted above.

I also read a great blog full of information about problem based learning. Ben Johnson's blog, The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom is a great resource for problem based learning. Johnson talks about how when teachers ask questions, it usually benefits the teacher more than it does the student. Teachers seem to think that if the student does not ask a question, than they understand the problem or topic completely, which usually isn't the case. Johnson's response to this method is, "The fallacy with this thinking is that sometimes the students do not understand that they do not understand, and if they do not know what they do not know, there is no way that they can ask a question about it." When you can get the students to ask the questions, you can ensure that the learning process is taking place.

This week's question was, what do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher? After reading and researching the articles given, I think that it is not enough as an educator to simply ask the question "Do you understand." Instead of just asking questions, Teachers could make it a fun learning activity and reward the students who answer correctly with things such as, bonus points on a test. Challenge the students to work together and really put their "thinking caps" on. It should always be my job to keep my students engaged in whatever topic I am teaching on.