Questions – The Source of all Knowledge?
What do you remember about your days in the classroom? Your fellow students? Teachers? Questions? Probably questions, lots and lots of questions, as it is essential to any learning to start with a question to which you want to know the answer. Questions are not just for the classroom though, as Einstein said, “The important thing is to never stop questioning”. Teachers are in a very privileged position of using and responding to questions as part of their daily work; we never stop questioning.
What do you remember about your days in the classroom? Your fellow students? Teachers? Questions? Probably questions, lots and lots of questions, as it is essential to any learning to start with a question to which you want to know the answer. Questions are not just for the classroom though, as Einstein said, “The important thing is to never stop questioning”. Teachers are in a very privileged position of using and responding to questions as part of their daily work; we never stop questioning.
As part of the professional learning development at BISB, the extra learning teachers do to improve their teaching practice, one of the learning groups has been studying questioning as part of their professional practice.
Ms Eyes has been leading our Teacher Learning Community through different ways to support, engage and challenge the students in our classroom through questions. We have all been sharing our learning, our successes and our next steps collaboratively to support each other in improving questions in our classrooms.
There has been a wide variety of different techniques tried in the classroom. Some of the techniques tried are: students of Hungarian writing their own questions to an answer; Science students rating how confident they were in their answers to questions for extra points; Key Stage 3 students building on each other’s answers to a question like a basketball team aiming to shoot a goal and English students using a question matrix to create ever more challenging questions. We have all been enjoying the process and the learning ourselves and hope that enjoyment is shared by our students.
Each member of our collaborative Teacher Learning Community on Questioning has challenged themselves to use questions effectively for our students and ensure that our students are better equipped to question themselves. In the words of Voltaire, “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”
Joanna Scaramella
English Teacher
