Blog Post 4

What Do We Need To Know About Asking Questions To Be An Effective Teacher?

Asking questions to students is a little more complex than what I expected it to be. I did not realize that there are so many different ways to approach questions to make students exercise their learning.

Preparing the questions that you're going to ask is important. If you're teaching a lesson and just coming up with the questions as you go, you may end up asking all sorts of different structured questions. That would result in them being unclear and confusing to the students. If you organize and prepare your questions ahead of time, they will be better understood by your students. It is better to take the time to do this before hand, so that you will have more time for teaching and helping the students with their questions and concerns.

When asking questions to students, you should always make sure you're helping them practice their skills, such as: Problem Solving, Critical Thinking, Sharing and Collaborating. When preparing your questions, structure them around having a limited number of correct answers to test the students' comprehension of the information.

Another thing we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher is to give the students the appropriate amount of response time. Five to ten seconds is a good amount of time to give the students to reflect on how they're going to answer the question presented to them.

This will increase the number of students willing to volunteer and give the answer. Also, be careful not to just answer the question for them after you have waited the appropriate response time, and no one has answered. By doing so, you would be letting them know that you will just give them the answer and they don't have to work to find it.

One more important factor is to never interrupt the students while they're giving an answer. Show you're interested by nodding your head, trying to maintain eye contact (even if they're not) and making positive facial expressions. Do not just stand there and look at your notes while a student is answering a question you have asked them. All in all there are many things to know about asking questions in the classroom. This post assignment has been very interesting to me and has opened my eyes to so many different things I had not yet explored.