Once you have established a safe and collaborative classroom, what else needs to be done to facilitate
effective questioning and discussion?
Another critical skill is to understand depth of knowledge and higher order thinking.
For a refresher on depth of knowledge and higher order thinking, you may wish to review
Webb’s Depth of Knowledge levels or Bloom’s Taxonomy.
You will want to be familiar with either or both of these to ensure that you are moving
both student and teacher thinking to higher cognitive levels by asking deeper questions.
There are many types and styles of questions, each with a different purpose, so it is important
to be intentional about when you should use different types of questions.
A hook question is intended to be motivating and engaging, while a reflective question
is used to support metacognitive thinking.
Other types of questions include diagnostic questions to activate prior knowledge, questions
to check for understanding as a formative assessment practice, probing questions to
get into student thinking, and predictive questions that strengthen cause and effect
thinking, just to name a few.
More information on the types of questions can be found on the Quality Questioning Worksheet
in the resources to the right of this video.Even after creating a classroom culture of respect,
reflection, and positive relationships, students need strong prompts for appropriate discussion.
The questions should be a higher order question from the upper levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy
or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge levels.
To keep the students engaged and interested in continuing the discussion, the topic and
starter questions should be related to student concerns and interests.
Even with an interesting topic, the teacher may need to keep the discussion going by asking
clarifying and follow-up questions when there is a lull in the action.
An effective discussion goes beyond turn and talk, but that is a good start.
Discussion can involve the whole class or smaller groups.
Although research reports that students ask less than 5% of the questions in elementary
and secondary classrooms, questioning and discussions do not always need to be led by
the teacher.
In fact, discussions may be more powerful if they are student-led.
It is important to encourage all learners to ask and answer questions.Here are some
tips and tricks for effectively facilitating a discussion in the classroom: Work with the
class to create a set of ground rules, also known as norms, to be followed during discussions,
and post it in the classroom.
One example of a norm is All initial thinking is welcome.
Direct your questions to the entire class and wait at least 30 seconds for a response
before repeating or changing the questions.
Have students write down a response to your question before discussing as a whole class,
so they are better prepared to respond.
Don’t stand at the front of the room; rather, sit down with the students to suggest you
are no longer lecturing and to take the focus off of the teacher.
Rather than responding to student comments, have other students respond to comments.
Divide a large class into smaller groups to discuss questions or problems, and then pull
the groups back together to report out and respond to each other.
Protocols for discussion can be found on the NSRF Protocols and Activities website.
There is some discussion etiquette that should be practiced by the teacher and the students
during discussion.
Listeners should let the speaker know they are listening by practicing active listening
skills including paraphrasing in which the listener repeats back to the speaker what
the listener thinks the speaker was saying.
At the end of a discussion, the teacher or a student can summarize the discussion and
reference back to the discussion when appropriate in future classroom activities.
Remember that you can’t rush perfection!
Do not try to rush a conversation.
As with other formative assessment practices, there are low tech and high tech tools that
can be used to facilitate questioning and discussion.
With Quizlet, teachers can create online flashcard games for lower cognitive level questions.
This is very effective in early grades, but these can be used as a warm-up for older students
as well.
Kahoot is a good tool for using higher cognitive level questions that build thinking and drive
discussion.
There are many other questioning tools and strategies with which you may be familiar.
Remember that with any strategy or tool, it’s the quality of the questions that determines
the level of success, not the tool or strategy itself!