Questioning
Effective Questioning
Every lesson, our teachers will seek regular opportunities to formatively assess pupils’ understanding and use this to inform what happens next in the lesson. This will be done through circulating and checking their live work, live marking and a range of questioning techniques.
Effective questioning is key to successful information gathering and checking what pupils have understood from the learning intended. Therefore, it is important for our teachers to develop a range of effective questioning techniques, enabling them to gain a good sense of how well pupils are learning. Equally, it is important for teachers to develop the capacity to be responsive, adjusting the explanatory inputs and tasks according to how well pupils are doing in making sense of the material.
This list of questioning techniques is not exhaustive and can be used in combination to check for understanding. All are examples of impactful questioning techniques in line with research.
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Examples of questioning strategies |
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Cold calling (no hands up) |
An inclusive strategy which aims to involve all pupils, keeping everyone thinking as the question is posed before sampling responses strategically. |
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Think pair share |
Pupils spend some time thinking of their response before pairing up to discuss, rehearse and share ideas with their partner, before sharing with the whole class and teacher. |
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Show-me boards (mini white boards) |
A good technique to sample the responses from the whole-class. Pupils write their response onto their mini whiteboards (MWBs) in response to a question and then, simultaneously show the teacher their responses. Enabling the teacher to check for whole-class understanding efficiently and effectively. |
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Say It Again Better |
Set a standard for the depth of verbal responses you expect from pupils and support them to produce high quality responses. With Say It Again Better you may accept an initial response but develop them each time. |
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Probing questions |
Develop pupils’ understanding by posing questions that make them probe their schema for the ideas being discussed. Supporting pupils to make links between ideas, to rehearse explanations to support long term memory, to connect abstract and concrete examples and to identify knowledge gaps and misconceptions. |
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Process questions |
Teachers should encourage the development of their pupils’ metacognition by focussing on questions such as ‘how do we know’ or ‘how do we work it out?’ Modelling and rehearsing dialogue around these questions supports pupils to develop the capacity to think in this way independently. |
Source: The Teaching Walkthrus, Sherrington and Caviglioli (2020) pages 88 - 103
To support our teachers in improving on their effective questioning, developing their questioning repertoire and other specific aspects of our classroom teaching we have invested in the WalkThrus Series. The WalkThrus are designed for busy teachers wanting to improve quickly and efficiently, making expert pedagogy clear and concise for all.
Source: Teaching Walkthrus series