Questioning strategies that should be consigned to the history books

Do a simple search for the word ‘teacher’ in Google and you’ll soon come across lots of photos of teachers standing at the front of a classroom with children having their hands in the air ready to answer a question. But is this actually what constitutes good teaching? Or is it an aged old practice that should now be consigned to history?

So what’s the problem with students putting their hands up to answer a question I hear you say? Surely that’s how we were all taught as students wasn’t it? Well, the underlying problem here is that by raising a hand and offering to ‘participate’ in answering the questions that a teacher is posing, means that students can also probably do the exact opposite - keep their hand down so they don’t have to participate. This creates an ‘opt in’ culture in where teachers are happy to regularly and habitually take answers from enthusiastic students who want to participate, but it lets others get away with opting out.

This creates two main issues within the classroom:

Opting out of having to think

If teachers usually only go to students who have their hands up, then by default if you keep your hand down it means that you’re not going to be picked to answer a question. In turn, this means that you don’t even need to think about the answer, because nine times out of ten the teacher will be selecting someone else to answer it. This means that as a passive student, you can just sit there and let everyone else do the work, occasionally writing down or copying down the right answers into your book when instructed.

Checking for understanding

If we only ever take answers from the enthusiastic students who want to contribute (presumably because they are confident that they have a good and accurate answer to offer), then we are at risk of making dangerous inferences about what the whole class know, when in fact we are only sampling a small cross section of students - the ones who already know the answer. This can lead to an assumption that I see so many teachers make when they say ‘Great, we’ve got this…let’s move on’ - when in reality, one enthusiastic, confident and knowledgeable student has got it, but we’ve assumed that this must be the case for everyone in the room.

Long term learning is all about strengthening our memory of something so that we can recall it at a later date - whether that is for an exam, or whether it is to use that knowledge in our life to either solve an issue or connect the knowledge to something else. Two great quotes on memory from Professor Daniel Willingham are ‘Memory is the residue of thought’ and that ‘We remember what we think about’. Therefore, our job as teachers is to make our students think regularly and deeply in our classrooms. Without this happening, students can very quickly slip into what we like to call ‘mental truancy’. A state of being where you are physically present, but mentally absent. In this state of mental truancy, students can ‘appear’ on the surface to be compliant (they are not causing any disturbance or disruption to the students around them), but are they actually engaged in the lesson with their brains having to think and work hard?

In order to stop this from happening, we need to move our classroom questioning culture out of the dark ages by using the following two strategies to elevate your questioning to the next level:

Cold Call

This strategy involves a ‘hands down’ approach to your questioning where every student has to think about the answers to your questions because it is up to you who you pick to answer the question. This means that the students don’t know who will be picked, so they all have to be thinking, just in case you pick them. This strategy resolves the first issue that we highlighted above of students being able to opt out of thinking.

Mini Whiteboards

Moving on to knowing what everyone in the room knows, rather than just the person you ask to answer the question, mini whiteboards allow everyone to show you what they know. By asking a question to the whole class and not just an individual, students can write their answer down on their board and then on your command, hold it up so you can very quickly gauge what everyone’s answer is. This way you can now make far more accurate and informed decisions of when to move on in your lesson once you are confident that learning has been secured and understood by all. 

As with everything in life, we can say we already do things, but there are always ways that we can do things more effectively and with more impact - usually by just tweaking a few small details. So look out for our videos, articles and infographics on Cold Call and Mini Whiteboards that go into far more detail on each strategy and give you our top tips on how to master these strategies so they become part of your teaching super powers.