3b: Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques

Philosophy

Questioning is a crucial part of teaching and an extremely subtle art. It functions to engage a student in learning, reflect on prior knowledge, and bridge the gap between a student's present knowledge and hitherto unknown possibilities. Some questioning may simply ask student to elaborate or clarify a previous answer. Other questions are developed with Bloom's taxonomy in mind and carefully scaffolded to allow students to reach beyond their present ability. Questioning in an important tool which, when properly implemented, can engage all students within a given class while simultaneously probling their content understanding.

Progress Self-Assessment

I begin all of my classes with a blog posting. This question is designed to link content to the students experience and to increase engagement while demonstrating relevance. Research has shown that teachers who develop questions on-the-fly often fail to compose questions that stimulate higher-order thinking. In order to address this concern, I write higher-order questions while composing my lessons. I also make a point of questioning every student at least once in the course of a given class to stimulate engagement.

Explanation of Artifacts

Artifact 1: Social Science Survey Class BlogIn all of my classes I use a blog posting to stimulate student engagement and activate prior knowledge. For example, in a unit on Gender, students are asked to reflect on what toys they played with as a child and whether they they had masculine or feminine sex traits. This is used as the "hook" in a lesson that discusses how gender identity is a consequence of social factors.

Artifact 2: Bill to Law Lesson Plan
The following SIOP lesson plan demonstrates how I devise higher-order thinking questions (HOTS) in the course of lesson planning.

Areas for Future Development

In the future, I hope to continue to my classroom discussion technique to have students take more responsibility for generating questions, both to initiate discussion and to proble the content of each others' answers. It is my hope that generating higher-order thinking questions will make the students engage with the material in a more meaningful way.