[MUSIC] Questions, questions, questions. Life is full of questions. Here are some that young people asked. Well, questions come in different forms. We have often closed questions, to which there's a right and wrong answer. There are open questions which explore a whole range of different possibilities. There are big questions, big thinking questions that require a lot of discussion. There are what are called higher-order thinking questions, which go beyond the very obvious, but really require a lot of judgement and a lot of thinking. You might call them rich questions and then there are questions which are linked to resources or tasks. So go and find out, what do you know about it? How do you find out about it? Which don't require the teacher to provide the answer, but require children to go and explore and find. And then there are no-hands-up questions. It's very easy often just to take those children who put their hands up and who always put their hands up, and the silent ones who maybe never contribute. We've seen in classroom observation children who can go through a whole day and never been asked a question because they sit at the back and then they never put their hand up. So no hands up questions means think about the question, take a little time maybe you want to discuss it with your neighbor and then, as a teacher, I'll choose who I want to answer the question. Well, there are two metaphors for Q and A or question and answer. There's the Ping pong metaphor, question, answer, question, answer, question, answer, question, answer. And that's very common when we look at classrooms and see teachers' questioning styles. And then there's the basketball metaphor that the teacher asks the question and then passes, passes, passes, passes, children pass from one to another before you actually go towards the goal and towards the answer to the question. So there are simple, obvious Q&A question answers and there are much more sophisticated probing questions. So here are some questions to ask yourself. Do I ask challenging questions? Pose questions in a non-threatening way? Give pupils time to think critically? Follow through on the implications of children's answers? Here's a teacher who asked a simple question, what are two and two, and the child replies five. How does the teacher respond to that? You might say no the answer is four? Or you might say well that's interesting. What is in the child's mind? Is it a two plus three the child's thinking, or is it a division, we don't really know and we can't address that learning difficulty until we understand what's in the child's mind. Do you always ask questions just to the brightest and the most likeable students in the classroom? Do you maybe ask difficult questions too early in a sequence? Should you leave difficult questions a little later when you've built up children's self confidence? Do you always ask the same type of questions or can you vary the nature of your question? And do you encourage pupil-pupil questions, pupils asking each other questions? And perhaps pupil's asking teachers questions. What do teacher's know? And do you always answer or ask questions to which you already know the answer? Or do you every ask questions as a teacher, to which you don't know the answer? Well if you ask the same thing of students, do students ask probing questions? Do they ask challenging questions of the teacher? Do your students ever ask really hard and difficult questions? When children are very young, they very often ask their parents very hard questions. And sometimes parents say well, that's really an interesting question. I don't know the answer but let's go and find out. Do students ever take notes on what other students or pupils are saying? Do they have a vocabulary to talk about learning? Do they come with a whole range of different ways or learn different ways to ask probing questions? Do students ever initiate improvements? Do they ever make significant decisions with a sense of personal authority? Do they ever exercise leadership for their own learning, for the learning perhaps of their colleagues? And in that, perhaps unfortunate phrase used by Personal to defer to the importance of a discriminating and thoughtful about what they're learning? Do they have an in-built crap detector? If we talk about teachers as inquirers, when teachers encourage questioning and when they encourage collaborative inquiry by their students, it carries greater impact when they themselves are seen as persistent inquirers, inquiring how we come to understand the world within and beyond the school and how we play a part in shaping the internal world of the classroom. When I read you a fairy tale, don't keep saying really. Finally have a look at this. It asks you to have a think about your own teaching and about learning in your classroom. You'll find this is also printed out in the resources and you can go through it and ask the questions of yourself. Do I create questions as part of my lesson preparation? Do I make sure I use a variety of questions, and so on? So you may want to go through this and do it for yourself. But more productively, I think if you do it for yourself or you do it collaboratively with others, it will be a way of evaluating how good you are as a teacher and how you create an environment in the classroom. Which helps some people to learn most effectively and most self comfortably. [MUSIC]
