Top 7 Questioning Techniques In The Classroom

As a teacher, you always use questions in the classroom. There are lots of reasons for using them. You could use questions to:

• engage your students,
• check for understanding and comprehension,
• seek opinions,
• encourage creative and critical thinking,
• review information,
• help students see other ways of thinking.

The techniques that you should use in questioning depend on the grade level, subject matter, and lesson objectives. Here are some of the top questioning techniques you should take into consideration to use in the classroom.

1. Pair and Share.

After posing a question to the class, give your students some time to think about the answer on their own. Then, have them turn to their neighbour to discuss the answer. They can exchange their ideas with their partners. Doing so helps students prepare their answer and share it in pairs and then with the rest in the class.

2. Teacher Random Selection.

If you have the same few students answering all of your questions, you can select the student who will answer the question. You may like to write the name of each student on cards. Then, draw a name to determine who will answer the question. Doing so pushes all students to think of the answer and prepare to share their ideas with the whole class.

3. Selecting Particular Students.

Choose brilliant students to sit in front of the class. These students will answer several questions. You could ask the questions and ask them to answer. Then, ask other students to repeat the answers. If one brilliant student is struggling to answer, allow him/her to “phone a friend” asking someone else in the class for help.

4. Asking in Sequence.

Think about having a list of students ordered alphabetically. As you ask questions to the class, try to move from one to another using their order in the alphabetical list. In this case, you may like to follow Bloom’s Taxonomy moving from the most basic type of questions (recall) to more complicated ones (evaluation). By doing so with your questions using this technique, your students will have the time to prepare their answers, too.

5. Selecting the Raised-Hand Students.

Post the question to the whole class asking students who know the answer to raise their hands. Doing so gives students to think and prepare the answer. Select one of the raised-hand students to answer. After getting the right answer, praise the student and ask one of those who don’t raise their hands to repeat the right answer.

6. Selecting After Modelling the Answers.

Ask a question and then model the answer by yourself. Then, select one student to say the model answer. Doing so helps students know how to answer questions perfectly and raises their confidence when answering questions. Also, this technique allows shy learners to participate in answering questions.

7. Asking Questions for Homework.

Write some questions on the board asking some students to read them aloud to the class. Then, ask students to prepare the answers to these questions at home. This allows time for students to think of the answers and perhaps they will share ideas to improve the answers. At the beginning of the next period, check that they have done the homework and elicit the answers from as many students as possible giving them your feedback, clarifying, and correcting anything.

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