Blog Post 4

What Questions Do We Ask? How Do We Ask?

What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher? Since questions are more important than answers it is key that the questions are effective. In the source,The Right Way to Ask Question in the Classroom by Ben Johnson,it does make sense that your students would get confused if you were the one who was supposed to know everything and yet you're the one asking the questions! Teachers need to come to grips with the fact that we may not know everything and our students know nothing. In most cases it is useful for a teacher to ask questions to check for the student's understanding, but sometimes you don't always get responses. You can ask if they understand all day in classroom, but according to the source they don't know they aren't understanding. Therefore you move on to the next subject and they do not learn. Classrooms should not be divided up by who is smart, who is not, and who doesn't care. The source says that after fourth grade, they know who they are and they play their roles accordingly. In this situation, this is where the student's are missing out on a lot of learning. The smarts ones get cocky and begin to intimidate those who don't think they are smart. And the ones who don't care need to find a reason to care. Education is very important and all students should have an equal shot of learning to their best ability. In these sources it always seems to go back to questions because it is one of the basic pieces to learning.

Three Ways to Ask Better Questions states and describes three actions that have the potential to our questioning. According to the source, "good questions make students think, they encourage participation and I think they improve the caliber of the answers students give and the questions they ask". The three actions are:

• Prepare Questions
• Play with Questions
• Preserve Good Questions

A lot of teachers don't prepare the questions they ask their students on a daily basis. Because they didn't prepare they can be unclear, which can bring about more confusion for the student's. If you prepare questions, you can expect them to be effective for the students. They can be engaging, and better yet, fun! "Playing with the question means leaving it unanswered for a while and using some strategies that encourage students to think about it." It allows for several answers to be given, that way you, as a teacher, can talk about the correct part of every answer. It also allows the students to continue their thinking if the question is intriguing enough. After you have prepared and played with questions, this is where you preserve the good questions. Use those questions as future reference so you can be sure your students are getting the full potential from them.

The most important thing as a teacher that you need to know about asking questions is simple. Are the kids actually learning anything? Questions are there to test the students on the knowledge you have given to them. If they don't know these answers, then they cannot progress forward. As long as your student's are learning, the questions are working. This makes you more of an effective teacher. As long as your students are learning all of the right things, you are being an effective teacher.