How I got better at questioning by D. Walker

By D. Walker

My current personal focus is on improving my questioning.  Using Jim Smith’s (The Lazy Teachers’ Handbook) advice, I actually shared this with my students.  I informed them that I am trying to improve my questioning; some of my colleagues have actually questioned my sanity in doing this but it has worked really well, indeed, in the past I have done this before and having the students understand WHY they are doing something and knowing that I have their best interests at heart has been something that has only had positive results.

Well the other day while I was thinking about how I can improve my questioning I obviously started with the well-known Bloom’s Taxonomy… (I am sad to admit I used to keep a laminated copy on my desk in the first three years of my teaching- however, I pretty much never used it)  and something ‘clicked.’

I broke it into my own version-lower to highest:

Identify

Repeat (quote)

Analyse/interpret

Evaluate

It then dawned on me that if a student followed that process - identify, quote,analyse/interpret/evaluate then what they basically had was a PEE paragraph.  I decided to take this a step further by equating the process to levels so it then (very loosely) became-

Identify=U-F

Identify and Repeat = E/D

Identify and Repeat and Analyse/Interpret = C/B

Identify and Repeat and Analyse/Interpret and Evaluate = A-A*

I then shared this with the students and got them to think about the 5ws (What, where, when, why and how) and to write an identify question, a repeat question, an analyse question and evaluate question.  Needless to say they soon made the link that the high order questions often need a HOW/WHY at the start.  I then re-iterated this idea and the need to constantly be internally evaluating in order to get better at it (because isn’t that what we do when we read/watch films etc- we are just better because we have practiced it more) and I reinforced the idea that following this sequence will avoid technique spotting and get the focus back on the pupil thinking ‘why did the writer do this?’  

Next I put a David Foster Wallace quote on the board - ‘Every love story is a ghost story’ - then get the pupils to write a response focusing on the analyse/interpret and evaluation part.  (pupils come up with absolutely amazing interpretations into this quote)

That was my starter.

Next I get the students to write down as many questions as they can in pairs for the text they are currently studying (A Christmas Carol is what I am doing with my year 8s).  I get some feedback and get them to choose one question to put on a question wall- they then write and stick up their question: (I say that it can be any one of the four high order thinking skills. There are some examples below:

The students then have to choose one question (not their own) and answer it for home learning as best as they can. 

In the plenary, I use Phil Beadle’s pick a number between 1+25 and then in that many words, explain what you learnt. Ticks off that numeracy need.