This is our Questioning week. We want to know what colleagues experiences are of questioning their classes without only allowing students who volunteer to answer.
We’re two days in. The students weren’t supposed to know about it, but they do. That’s good I think.
There hasn’t really been a buzz about it, but the feedback so far has been genuinely positive. I think (and hope) people are really trying it, and the lack of ‘buzz’ I hope reflects that we’ve been working on Questioning for a while, so it’s not a big deal to do this.
We’ll see. I’m observing a lesson taught by one of our teach first colleagues tomorrow (in his second year of teaching) and I hope he uses no hands up. I’m also looking forward to asking students about their experiences.
i’d love to hear more on how this works in the classroom, are you asking children to answer the question, any children? is that how it works, or are they just answering questions without putting their hands up, i worked with a man who talked about not asking children to put their hands up, just allowing them to answer questions and talk in pairs and small groups to come up with the answer, they had to think on their own then with a partner then find others who thought they had the answer until the whole group were humming with the excitement of knowing the answer.
By: robert stephenson on January 29, 2008
at 11:34 pm
Actually, it’s more that the teacher conscripts the students to answer the question.
I use it in almost all of my lessons, so the format of Questioning is that the teacher asks a question to the whole class.
Then allows significant thinking time.
Then selects a student (apparently at random, but the teacher should know each student’s ability and so will select a student who the question will challenge – so for a particularly able student it might be an evaluative question but for a less able student it might be quite closed in nature) to answer.
Then after selecting the student the teacher allows thinking time (according to Ted Wragg, the average amount of time we allow students to answer before throwing it to someone else, helping, or answering it ourselves is under 1 second) of at least ten seconds.
Then the student answers, and no matter what the answer the teacher asks another student to comment on the answer – building in open, higher-order thinking questions.
Not as creative as your idea, but it has given me an idea for a post about group work. I’ll have to write it late tonight or tomorrow though, as it’s hectic at work!
By: Stuart Lock on January 30, 2008
at 8:56 am