Hello Everyone, One of the most important aspects of teaching is posing questions. As teachers, we often ask questions to determine what students have learned as well as what they think. There is a difference between asking open-ended and closed-ended questions, and most of us use both types of questions during our instruction.
At the following Ohio State University webpage, you can check out a great list of ideas related to questioning strategies. There are also two short videos at the bottom of the page on learning to ask better questions.
One thing I’m really interested in is getting learners to pose their own questions. What do you all think about this issue? What are some good ways to organize instruction so students can pose their own important questions? How do you create time and space for this during class?
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Cheers, Susan
Assessment Moderator
Comments
Hello, All,
Susan, thanks for sharing the link and for posing important questions about getting learners to pose their own questions. Given the current education/economic realities, it is our job to help students become more autonomous learners. We help them ask questions by modeling good questioning and, for students at lower levels or learning English, by providing sentence starters or question banks/lists for them to use. Index cards or post-it notes are great ways for students to write questions for each other before/during/after reading or topic discussion or part of Think-Pair-Share.
The Teaching Channel also shared a technique called "Stop Light Exit Tickets" that can be adapted for student generated questions. The Teaching Channel features hundreds of short videos from K12 classrooms focused on specific aspects of teaching and learning. One video I watched recently demonstrates the use of “exit slips” as a means of assessment. This high school English teacher uses a stop light graphic posted on the wall and sticky notes distributed to each student. Before leaving class, students can choose to write something they learned and post their sticky on the green light, post questions they considered or new ideas that were generated for them on the yellow light, or post something that stopped their learning on the red light.
You can watch this one-minute video at this link https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/daily-lesson-assessment?fd=1
Best regards,
Dave
Dave Coleman
ESL Teacher Advisor
LAUSD Division of Adult and Career Education
Hi Dave, Thank you for sharing how you encourage students to generate their own questions by providing sentence starters or question banks. Could you share some specific examples of how you are doing this? What population of learners are you working with?
Best, Susan
Assessment Moderator