Thoughts on Questioning and Discussion

How can we best facilitate outstanding classroom dialogue?

We have been considering questioning, discussion and oracy in depth in recent INSET and staff meetings. Since this time I have noticed different aspects of these topics in a variety of situations and have decided to try and capture my thinking. These are very much a draft and are somewhat influenced by my context of being in the Mathematics classroom.

Before giving instructions/talking about something/asking questions, it’s important to insist on active listening.

• Learners to stop what the are doing.
• This includes writing/discussions.
• At 6th form in particular this includes not allowing opting out/moving ahead/laptops open.

We can prepare students for active listening by giving 1 minute / 30 second warnings before calling the class to attention.

At the point of all-class discussion we need to be using cold-calling the overwhelming majority of the time. This is easily justified by the gains in engagement and confidence that has been shown repeatedly in studies.

It’s important that we establish ways of working:

• Give time for thinking before asking. Actively pause. Count to 5, look at your watch, do something to ensure that you give time.
• So when transitioning from individual/pair/group work to all-class can follow the following:

Time warning — Ask for attention — Pause — Be Seen Looking — Pose the question — Pause — Choose a student.

• There are a lot of stages here but they can help us bring more students with us and can help us avoiding answering the same questions repeatedly.
• Students need to be clear on our expectations of them, this is most effective when it is explicit.
• Not replying is not an option, make this clear. Students have had time to think, what were they thinking about? If the problem was not resolved what is it that was causing the issue?
• Students have the option to respond or to ask a question or to identify something specific they do not understand.

If we are explaining/discussing something that is long / complicated / challenging, we can follow up with:

• Opportunities for students to ask questions
• and if these are not forthcoming, we should make the assumption that students understand to the point of being able to explain the concept.
• at this point can cold-call students with a challenge to explain all or some of what is being learnt.
• Deep relational understanding requires multiple run-throughs so students are benefiting whether they understood in the first place or not.
• If the concepts / ideas / tasks involved are particularly long or elaborate, multiple students can be called upon to either do the next step or to verbally “annotate” giving reasons why other students did what they did.
• Another way of helping develop confidence would be to ask students to make notes at some point during the discussion and then to use these notes either as a prompt to ask questions about what they’re still unclear on or as support for explaining what was discussed.

On a slightly different point it’s important that we have high expectations of quality of expression and students should be challenged to speak clearly and confidently and asked to repeat if necessary.