‘… there are only two good reasons to ask questions in class: to cause thinking and to provide information for the teacher about what to do next’. Dylan Wiliam, ‘Embedded Formative Assessment, 2011.
There’s an article by Jonathan Doherty in the September 2017 edition of the Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching, ‘Impact’, in which he discusses different levels of questioning (for example, lower-order and higher-order questions) and he references questioning taxonomies that are designed to help teachers with their approach to questioning. Questioning is a huge topic; whole books could be written on it. I’m very interested in how questioning might be used to create links between items of knowledge, because it is those links that make strong schemas – but that’s for another day. In this blog, I want to focus on questioning that maximises student engagement, because high-engagement classrooms have a positive impact on students’ achievement (for example, Research by Dawes, Mercer and Wegerif, 2000 and Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif and Sams, 2004).
As soon as we direct a question at one student, we provide an opportunity for everyone else to switch off, for a time. If we want to ask an individual student, this risk is unavoidable, but we can mitigate it by 1) Asking the question of everyone first and allowing some wait time (perhaps 3-5 seconds) 2) Only then choosing the student to put the question to (Doug Lemov’s ‘Cold Calling’) and 3) Optionally, then ‘Bouncing’ their answer to another student or students, to see if they agree, can add anything to the answer already given, and so on. This last technique is often called ‘Pose, Pause, Pounce, Bounce’ or ‘kneading’, and teachers use it to guide all students towards more developed answers to their questions.
Think-Pair-Share is a good way to encourage everyone to take part in questioning. It is very easy to organise and it gives students both time to reflect on their own and the opportunity to help each other away from the immediate glare of a question directed at any individual student. The comparatively non-threatening situation this creates is especially helpful to lower-performing students, who may want to opt out of thinking because they lack confidence or believe they don’t know the answer. The other big advantage of Think-Pair is that students are able to articulate their thinking; articulating our thinking helps us develop it, as we consolidate ideas in our mind during paired discussion. Think-Pair-Share can of course involve Cold Calling a student or students to give an answer after the initial pair work: the Share phase.
In general, directing questions at everyone is far better than directing them at individuals, because we want everyone thinking and even if a proportion of the class sometimes chooses not to think, it’s likely that many in the class will do so; over time, asking questions of everyone is bound to deliver a greater ‘bang for the buck’ than asking questions of individual students and hoping everyone else will pay close attention.
Whole-class response systems, such as writing answers on mini whiteboards and holding them up, doing class polls with multiple choice questions, and the various options that use digital technology, allow everyone to answer at the same time, and they also give the teacher the chance to check the students’ understanding – checking for understanding regularly is essential because, as Graham Nuttall has so clearly pointed out, students frequently do not learn what they are ‘taught’ (The Hidden Lives of Learners, 2007).
The teacher asking everyone the questions has to be far more engaging for all students than having to sit through the teacher asking individual question after individual question directed at other people. That experience can feel interminable. And it’s a more efficient use of precious class time, too – there’s just too little time available NOT to ask everyone, isn’t there? Good questions are hard to design; why not expect everyone to answer them?
Hands up or No Hands up?
Here’s a good way of increasing the achievement gap in school: routinely ask a lot of questions and allow the students to put up their hand to answer. Allowing hands up ‘makes the smart kids smarter’ (Dylan Wiliam, 2011). In any classroom, if you ask a question, it’s the eager students, the confident students, and the higher performers who are most likely to put up their hand to answer. If this as the norm in the classroom, over time it is bound to increase the gap in achievement between those who know less and those who know more. No hands up, except to ask a question, should be the norm in every classroom. Everyone benefits, but the lower performers benefit most because it’s much harder to opt out if the teacher’s typical practice is to ask questions of everyone and expect an answer from everyone.
The takeaways
1) If we increase all students’ engagement in the classroom we are likely to improve their learning, over time
2) When it comes to questioning, the best way to do that is by routinely asking questions of everyone, with whole-class response systems that allow the teacher to check for understanding
3) No hands up, because that just makes the smart kids smarter and increases the achievement gap
Here is a question for everyone: To what extent do you agree that accepting hands up ‘makes the smart kids smarter’, over time?
