Basic questioning techniques

BASIC QUESTIONING TECHNIQUES

Teachers use questioning for many reasons

To mantain the flow of the learning within the lesson

To provide an opportunity for pupils to share their opinions

To initiate collaborative thinking.

To test student memory and comprehension.

To asses what has been learned,understood and applied.

To engage students with learning.

To create a sense of shared learning

To challenge the level of thinking.

To foster speculation, hypothesis and idea/opinion forming;

To seek the views and opinions of pupils.

To model higher order thinking using examples and building on the responses of students.

Questioning approaches These are some strategies to use questions:

Thinking Time: Consciously waiting for a pupil or class to think through an answer.

Time Out: Time for thinking and talking.

No Hands Questioning:.Pupils will be selected by the teacher to share the answer.

Basketball questioning: Move questions and discussions between pupils.

Conscripts and Volunteers: Using a planned mix of ‘conscripts’ and ‘volunteers’.

Phone a friend: Removes stress to enable those who cannot answer to participate.

Preview: Previewing questions in advance

High Challenge: Phrasing questions carefully to concentrate on Bloom’s Taxonomy higher challenge areas.

Focus questioning: This will help students to answer bigger questions.

Signal questions: Providing signals to pupils about the kind of answer that would best fit the question being asked.

The Five Ws, also known as the “Five Ws and H”, is a concept used in journalism, research and in any basic investigation or interrogation of evidence

It is a formula for developing speculative thinking and establishing all we can deduce from the evidence we have (text, stories, images, sound, film, conversation etc)

The maxim of the Five Ws (and one H) is that any analysis of basic facts and information is only complete, when we can answer a checklist of six questions, each of which comprises an interrogative word:

WHAT? WHERE? WHO? WHEN? WHY ? HOW?

The principle underlying the maxim is that each question should elicit a factual answer