How to ask a question
Continuing to add more detail to my first post I am going to look at the issues that arise in posing questions in the (Mathematics) classroom.
An idea that has stuck with me is what Holt describes in How Children Fail. The lessons and skills that students learn in the school setting despite the teacher’s intentions. One of these is how to avoid answering challenging questions even when called upon:
“She knows the teacher’s strategy of asking questions of students who seem confused, or not paying attention. She therefore feels safe in waving her hand in the air, as if she were bursting to tell the answer, whether she really knows it or not.”
So what can we as teachers do to counter these strategies and what can we do to help students feeling the need to develop them?
The second question is much bigger, I don’t have the space to address that here or now. Students developing efficient and effective strategies for avoiding questions is systemic and is a problem that requires a deep dive into the ideas that motivate schools and the curriculum.
The first question is not easy but is more practical. In my first post I looked at a framework that considered pre-transition, transition, active listening, checking, inclusive posing of the question and finally selecting the student.
This last step can be deliberate or it can be random. Either method can result in a silence that can feel like a long time. One common teacher response is sometimes referred to as funneling: a series of questions quickly reducing the difficulty/challenge/scope of the question posed. A question on substituting into an algebraic expression can be reduced to a simple multiplication. It is useful to anticipate this problem and to think of strategies to overcome it.
The first thing to bear in mind is that the silence is usually shorter than it feels. Allowing students the time to process and respond is important and establishes the importance of patience and reflection in the classroom. If students try to opt-out, saying they don’t know, ask them to repeat the question, isolate an aspect of it that they don’t understand. After explaining the question or the problem it is sometimes the case that students are able to answer the original question but even in the case where this is not true the student has added to the classroom discourse and will be more ready to be involved in future.
I’m interested in people’s reactions to these thoughts. They are mainly reflections on INSET discussions, reading from many years ago and classroom practice. If people have different experiences or ideas please share.
