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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Foreword by John Hattie. Questioning is a staple feature of a teacher's toolkit across all phases of education. Classrooms are awash with explanation, modelling and feedback, but of all the pedagogical strategies at a teacher's disposal, questioning is one of the most important. It is the heartbeat of a classroom. While the art of asking a question seems relatively straightforward, to what extent do teachers consider the types of questions they're using? Are the questions they ask students actually helping to support learning? InPowerful Questioning,Michael Chiles delves into the complexity of asking questions and how best to use this pedagogical tool as a powerful springboard to support learning in the classroom. Teachers are described by many as 'professional question-askers' and the use of questioning in the teaching and learning process dates back to one of the most influential users and developers of questions, the Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates believed that by asking questions we encourage reflection, and that their use is most effective when we create a continual loop of dialogue between the asker and the receiver, to allow movement from surface to deeper level thinking.Powerful Questioningtakes inspiration from this, providing original theory that relates back to the historical use of questioning in the classroom throughout. Offering a fresh perspective on how questioning can be engineered to support effective learning,Powerful Questioningexamines the reasons behind the questions we ask and reveals the power of asking the right questions, in the right way, at the right time. It details a set of core principles, recommendations and classroom-based practical examples that can be used to implement powerful questioning both in the classroom and wider school. Michael's aim is to help teachers become research-informed on the theories around the use of questioning in the classroom, whilst also providing a wide range of practical classroom-based strategies. Readers will take away specific examples from a broad range of case studies in which teachers at different phases of education (from Key Stages one to five) share how they use questioning to improve learning and retention. Essential reading for all teachers and school leaders.
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Praise for Powerful Questioning
Powerful Questioning is going to prove a potent tool to every teacher who reads it. Chiles brilliantly marshals research and practical strategies to unpick the subtle but crucial art of questioning in the classroom. It can be too easy to take questioning for granted, so common is it to the classroom, but for even experienced teachers, it can prove a tricky aspect of teaching to improve. This book offers a wealth of useful reflection, along with activities and insights, to propel teachers’ questioning skills towards expert levels.
Alex Quigley, author of Closing the Writing Gap, National Content and Engagement Manager, Education Endowment Foundation
Questioning is possibly the most powerful lever teachers have in the classroom to drive learning. This book is an authoritative work not just on the research underpinning it but also on how to use it in practice. Highly recommended.
Dr Carl Hendrick, co-author of How Learning Happens
Some salutary statistics here on the range of questions currently asked in our classrooms and the massive opportunities for deepening pupils’ learning when we reconsider how to extract best value from them. Michael Chiles has written a terrific book to explain why and to show us how. An essential resource for CPD for every school.
Mary Myatt, education writer, speaker and curator, Myatt & Co
One can’t help but marvel at how Michael has been able to weave important research with his classroom insight to make this book on questioning a valuable contribution to every teacher’s professional learning. ‘Questions are an integral part of our daily lives’, Michael asserts, and I tend to think this book will be an integral part of developing our essential question-asking skills in the classroom.
Dr Steven Berryman, President, Chartered College of Teaching, Director of Creativity, Music and Culture, Charter Schools Educational Trust
BThe best teachers ask lots of questions. But what are the most effective questions to ask? When and how should we ask them? And how can we shape our classroom environment so that students feel comfortable answering questions?
In this impressive book, Michael Chiles provides compelling answers to these key questions and more. Powerful Questioning expertly deconstructs the art of questioning, offering highly practical advice for every classroom practitioner.
Mark Roberts, English teacher, Director of Research, Carrickfergus Grammar School
At the heart of every great lesson is questioning. Yet, for years, the CPD around questioning had been limited to simply ‘closed questions are bad’ and ‘open questions are good’. If we were lucky, then someone might even waft Bloom’s taxonomy to spice things up or the facilitator might get you to throw questions scrunched into paper balls or pass questions around on Post-it notes, because it was done once in an ‘Outstanding’ lesson.
Micheal Chiles’ Powerful Questioning is a thoughtful and thorough exploration of how to effectively use questioning in the classroom. Rather than looking at fancy tricks, Chiles explores the creation, use, function and impact of questions in education. The narrow focus really helps you to refine and question your existing practice. As the title suggests, questioning can be powerful and we, as practitioners, need to explore and consider how we can make every interaction have an impact in the classroom.
A book that proves that you can teach an old dog, like me, a few tricks and, of course, there’s loads of stuff for new dogs, I mean teachers, too.
Chris Curtis, Head of English, author of How to Teach English: Novels, Non-Fiction and their Art of Navigation
CMichael Chiles states in Powerful Questioning, ‘of all the pedagogy strategies at the teacher’s disposal, questioning is one of the most dominant methods of instruction. It is the heartbeat of a classroom.’ I found this to be true in my years of working with cognitive scientists researching how children learn in a classroom. In my experience, questioning is fundamental in pursuing the powerful tools of retrieval, spacing, interleaving and metacognition, all rooted in robust research. Understanding how we learn and using the proper questioning techniques that develop critical thinking assists the teacher in promoting successful learning. John Hattie states in the introduction, ‘The hard part is asking the right question at the right time for the right purpose and with the right level of complexity.’ Michael Chiles gives us the knowledge and techniques that will make our use of questioning most effective.
Patrice M. Bain, co-author of Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning and Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning, author of A Parent’s Guide to Powerful Teaching
Teachers ask hundreds of questions a day in their classrooms. But do we make the most of them? In this superbly researched and referenced book, Michael Chiles explores the purpose and untapped potential of questioning within classroom pedagogy, giving the reader powerful insight into this crucial element of effective teaching. As well as examining why questioning matters for responsive teaching, he carefully dissects the types of questioning we can use but also how questions can be used in formative assessment to check for understanding, diagnose and support pupil reflection. His approach is carefully interwoven with cognitive science and how questioning can support both deeper thinking and the long-term acquisition of knowledge and skills. He doesn’t duck the fact that both teachers and pupils can often find questioning hard; rather, he explores the reasons behind these challenges and offers practical and accessible strategies that can build classroom culture to allow powerful questioning to flourish and thrive. As with his previous books on assessment and feedback, this book is another gem – rooted in Dhis own rich personal reflections and experience, his passion for teaching and his love of learning more about what makes the biggest difference in classrooms and to pupils’ success. A must-read for teachers and leaders in all settings.
Andy Buck, Founder of Leadership Matters and BASIC Coaching
Effective questioning techniques and strategies to promote deep thinking are crucial aspects of an effective teacher’s classroom toolkit. In this book, Michael Chiles provides a plethora of examples underpinned by research to elicit our own deep thinking of how and why we ask questions in our classrooms. Within each chapter there are multiple reflection tasks and related activities for readers to complete, making this book not just something to read but, more importantly, something to practise. A superb addition to any classroom teacher’s pedagogical bookcase.
Jon Tait, education leader, author and speaker
Acknowledgements
A huge thank you to John Hattie for sharing his reflections on questioning and writing the foreword. Thanks also to the contributors who shared their thoughts on the power of questioning in education, as well as all the teachers I have observed over the years. You are an inspiration for the next generation of teachers and make a difference to pupils’ lives every day.
I would also like to extend my gratitude to the Great Schools Trust, in particular Shane Ierston and Katie Sharp for their support while I was writing the book.
Finally, thank you to my wife, Sarah Thornton.vi
Contents
viii
Introduction
The power of a question
The greatest attribute of questioning is that it stimulates thinking in the classroom.
Michele Filippone1
Questioning is a staple feature of a teacher’s toolkit across all phases of education. Our classrooms are awash with explanation, modelling and feedback, but of all the pedagogy strategies at the teacher’s disposal, questioning is one of the most dominant methods of instruction. It is the heartbeat of a classroom.
Take a moment to consider the last lesson you taught and how many questions you asked. Teachers are described by many as ‘professional question-askers’, and the use of questioning in the teaching and learning process dates back to one of the most influential users and developers of questions, the Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates believed that by asking questions we encourage reflection, and their use is most effective when we create a continual loop of dialogue between the asker and the receiver, to allow movement from surface to deeper level thinking. Questions are the tool that enable teachers to transfer knowledge, leading to the conclusion that effective questioning is effective teaching.
Classroom teachers worldwide spend a large percentage of their time in the questioning–response mode; so much so that several 2research studies indicate that an estimated 40% of classroom time is spent in this mode.2 Therefore, we can deduce that questioning must be a pivotal element in the teaching and learning process, and that asking good questions plays a critical part in supporting pupil achievement. The time spent questioning has remained fairly consistent since 1912, with Leven and Long identifying that 8% of the school day is spent asking questions – a statistic that remained static between 1912 and 1981.3
With all this time spent asking questions, we might assume that most teachers in most classrooms encourage pupils to think with the questions they ask. However, while questioning is a dominant component of many lessons across all phases, Orletsky indicated that all too often the questions teachers ask haven’t been well prepared and don’t serve the purpose of encouraging pupils to think.4 Therefore, the art of asking questions is masked by the purpose of the questions asked, leaving a gap between question delivery and its subsequent impact on pupil achievement.
Pedagogy reflection: Taking our time to create purposeful questions will be more beneficial than merely asking lots of purposeless questions.
The art of asking questions underpins everything we do as teachers. It is the backbone of communication between teachers and pupils, pupils and pupils, and teachers and teachers. As Filippone noted in the epigraph at the beginning of the chapter, it ‘stimulates thinking’ to encourage reflection and initiate information recall, which in turn reveals the quality of what pupils are thinking and 3their degree of understanding. It is the key to unlocking what is hidden, the fuel to prompt further thought and the shining light to developing a deeper understanding. This is reinforced by Ausubel who said: ‘The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him/her accordingly.’5
Without questions, we are essentially left in the dark about what our pupils know and don’t know. As Ausubel observed, we need to ascertain what learners already know in order to decide what needs to be taught. We do this by asking questions. Without knowing what our pupils have learned, we can’t support them to move forward and develop their understanding further. In fact, its role as a teaching tool in the classroom has been the subject of studies for many years, which alongside my own personal experiences and that of other practising teachers will underpin a lot of the discussion that threads throughout the book. As with any research, it isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, meaning that the research outlined and the strategies suggested for you to use in your classroom, or as a leader to introduce to colleagues, might look different to fit your context. We certainly can’t adopt a tick-box culture when using questions as a pedagogic tool in our classrooms. What we can do is examine the best bets from the research and consider how they might apply with the pupils we support in our own communities, as well as the colleagues with whom we work.
That is the reason why, alongside unravelling the reasons behind why we ask questions as well as the potential power of asking questions, I will also outline a set of core principles, recommendations and classroom-based scenarios that can be used to implement powerful questioning in your classroom and school. After fifteen years of teaching, I am a firm believer that creating a set of key principles for pedagogy, such as how schools approach giving feedback or using assessment to judge pupil performance, is beneficial 4because it reduces the potential for a tick-list approach to applying research in the classroom. When this happens, school leaders tend to use the same blanket approach across all phases and subjects.
Let’s look at one example to illustrate this. One of the main findings I have taken from reading over sixty research papers on questioning is that the most effective teachers ask lots of questions in their classrooms. At face value, this is a true statement. However, quantity is a poor proxy for quality if what we want is for teachers to ask powerful questions that generate more than surface-level thinking. It would miss what we have started to unravel in this introduction, that the intention and delivery of the question is more important than the number of questions asked. Gall emphasised the importance of asking quality questions, commenting that it is the quality rather than the quantity of teacher questions that promotes pupil learning.6 In my experience, the tick-list approach to implementing pedagogy in schools isn’t effective and ultimately has a negative impact on learning.
With this in mind, as you engage with the content in the book, there will be opportunities to spend some time reflecting on your own practice and experience of asking questions with a series of activities that you can complete either by yourself or with colleagues in your department. This feels like an ideal moment to begin with our first activity. 5
Activity
Research-based evidence is now a common feature within schools. Thinking about your own school context, what research-based pedagogy strategies have been introduced recently? Do you feel you have had time to implement the strategies within the context of your subject?
If yes, can you identify the mechanisms used to implement the strategy?
If no, what factors do you think might have affected its implementation?
When teachers use questions, it opens the door to establishing to what extent their explanations and models have been understood, it allows pupils to express their views and develop their understanding of a subject, and it provides teachers and pupils with opportunities to give feedback. So compelling is this view that curriculum reformer and teacher-educator Hilda Taba declared that when teachers use questions it is ‘the single most influential teaching act’7 because when they are used to prompt pupils to think deeply about knowledge, they have the potential to contribute towards enhancing learning.
A teacher could end up asking over a million questions over the course of their career.8 These will vary from lower to higher order questions, promoting surface to deeper level thinking depending on the type and number of questions asked. Getting this balance right is challenging, and it seems that the research is inconclusive on which of these types of questions is more effective. However, I 6will outline how combining these different questions strategically using a linear approach is more likely to create the foundations for developing and deepening pupil understanding. It is a bit like constructing a tower: you need a strong base on which to build the columns and to create the stability necessary to add increasing numbers of floors and height to the building. When asking questions, we need to start with those that elicit initial recall and then move towards those that prompt deeper thinking, requiring pupils to do some deep excavation from stored memories in their schema to articulate their understanding in new or unfamiliar contexts.
Schemas enable us to form a mental representation of the world. The term was first introduced by Jean Piaget who believed that schema underpinned key stages in cognitive development. Piaget defined schema as ‘a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by core meaning’.9 From Piaget’s definition, we can summarise that a schema is a way to organise knowledge in ‘files’ that relate to different aspects of the world. As a person develops, so the number and complexity of schemas increase. In essence, neither lower order nor higher order questions are necessarily better than the other, but a combination of both in the question–response mode have the power to assist in stimulating thinking and building a more advanced understanding of the world around us. We will explore this further in Chapter 3.
Pedagogy reflection: Combining the use of lower order and higher order questions will be more powerful than using them in isolation.
Right from the beginning, trainee teachers will be asking hundreds of different types of question as they develop their craft 7in the classroom. Many of these questions will be fired at pupils with the aim of checking for understanding, activating thinking, recalling knowledge, promoting reflection, reinforcing expectation and posing a challenge.
In a research study of forty teachers, Brown and Edmondson found that the most common criteria teachers cited for asking questions was pupils’ ability, with the main reasons including: for gaining attention and understanding (high ability), for checking and revision (medium ability) and for understanding and management (low ability).10 The reasons and percentages are listed below, with encouraging thought, checking for understanding and gaining attention receiving the highest share.11
Activity
Working with a colleague, reread the responses from the teachers in the table above on the reasons why they asked pupils questions and rank them in order of how you use them in your classroom. Try to think of examples of questions you have asked with the intention of eliciting one of these reasons. For example, for ‘review, revision and recall’: ‘Based on what we studied last lesson, what coastline do headlands and bays form on?’ 9
All of these aims are key to promoting a learning culture within your classroom. Alongside these intentions, Morgan and Saxton suggest that questions have five core purposes:
The process of asking pupils questions means teachers can ensure they are involved in the lesson.When pupils answer a question, it provides them with the opportunity to share their views on the topic of discussion.When teachers ask pupils a question, it allows other pupils to hear different perspectives from their peers.Asking different types of questions enables teachers to control the flow of their lesson, not only with respect to learning but also to ensure that pupil behaviour is maintained.Questioning pupils at different points in the lesson provides teachers with valuable information which helps to determine what they have learned and therefore what to cover in subsequent lessons.12In essence, asking questions brings many benefits, and the more strategic we are as classroom practitioners with our use of questions, the more likely we are to support our pupils to learn. This was echoed by Rosenshine in his ten principles of instruction, one of which was dedicated to asking questions: ‘Questions allow a teacher to determine how well the material has been learned and whether there is a need for additional instruction. The most successful teachers ask a large number of questions.’13 While Rosenshine indicated that the best teachers ask lots of questions, as we have seen, not all questions equate to supporting learning. We will explore this later on when we consider what it means to ask the right questions.
10Rosenshine is not the only researcher who has championed the power of questions; others have also emphasised the importance of using questions in the classroom to promote learning. In 1978, Gall et al. conducted a two-week experiment with a group of elementary school classes based on the topic of ecology. The study involved one group of classes reading a textbook each day and then answering questions set by the teacher, while the other classes read the same textbook but didn’t engage in answering questions from the teacher. At the end of the study, the group who participated in the question session from the teacher performed better than the control group.14
Pedagogy reflection: When teachers ask the right questions and involve pupils, there is a greater probability that it will boost pupil performance.
