1. Q uality uestioning Materials adapted from QUILT curriculum:
Henrico County
Public Schools
Welcome to the Quality Questioning Professional Development Workshop. This is a piece of a workshop designed to address a Henrico county initiative. We have adapted the QUILT curriculum to address the needs of the Henrico division and we call our initiative Quality Questioning.
Today we are providing a BRIEF overview of a piece of the Quality Questioning curriculum - effective classroom questioning strategies that will help us present questions more effectively and help our students be more engaged.
Some of you may remember the questioning initiative from the early 90’s, and others will recognize the material. We hope you will walk away a renewed (or new) understanding of some of the facets of quality questioning practices and a few tangible strategies for implementing practices that will enhance student learning.
Materials adapted from QUILT curriculum:
Questioning and Understanding to Improve Learning and Thinking

2. Focus Questions
How does presentation of the question impact quality of student response?
What things should be considered when posing a question?
What strategies can be used to engage all students?

3. Affect WHAT students learn.
Teacher Questions…
Affect WHAT students learn.
40%
(Quilt Pg 12)
Traditionally, teachers control the classroom questioning process. Teacher use of questioning, therefore, has a tremendous impact on student learning.
The questions that teachers ask indicate to students what the teacher believes is important for them to learn. Afterall, we don’t ask questions about things that aren’t important, and students are quick to pick up on this. Students place more emphasis on the facts related to the content teachers ask about rather than the content in their texts.

4. Questioning Patterns…
Affect
WHICH
students learn
HOW MUCH.
40%
(Quilt Pg 12)
Secondly, teacher questioning patterns affect which students learn how much. For example, teachers have a tendency to call on those perceived as high achieving more often than those perceived as lower achieving. In terms of equity or voice and engagement, this puts some students at a disadvantage. Over the course of years of this practice, low achievers become less engaged, get further behind and tune out of learning all together.
Teacher influence on student learning goes further than just who we “call on” to respond. Other factors, like length of wait time, prompting, and probing practice tend to vary based on our perceived ability of our students. Quality questioning modules encourage us to analyze our questioning beliefs and patterns, and adjust our practices to make questioning and learning opportunities available for all students.

5. (Quilt Pg 115)
In addition, teachers tend to target for response students who sit in the action zone of the classroom—the area that is in the teacher’s usual line of vision. Assertive students tend to self-select these seats and end up getting more attention from the teacher. This put our lower achieving students at risk of receiving fewer opportunities to participate.
The action zone can be defined as the area of the classroom in which the highest number of teacher-student interactions occur. In other words, more questions are directed to students who sit in this particular area of the classroom. Interestingly, more students in this area tend to volunteer responses and initiate questions themselves.
The actual action zone depends on the classroom arrangement (think Fred Jones). Research shows that regardless of room arrangement,
the action zone is in the teacher’s primary line of sight.
students self-select to be in (or out) of this zone.
may be linked to left/right handedness.
when teachers move throughout the room they increase the size of the action zone.
Engage participants in a discussion with the following two questions: (1) How would an action zone tend to affect low achievers? (2) What can we as teachers do to break up action zones—to assure that we do not favor one area or group of students?
Participants will probably respond with such ideas as changing the seating plan routinely, changing the teacher’s position in the classroom frequently, etc.

6. Student Questions… 40% Determine WHETHER OR NOT learning occurs.
(Quilt Pg 13)
Questions are tools for meaning making. More specifically
Invitations for conversation. Learning is a social activity and communication is an essential 21st century social skill. For our students to develop the communication skills to been successful, teachers need to help students build confidence in asking and answering questions.
It is sometimes the case that we don’t know what we don’t know. This is a dilemma in our current learning environment. Students need to be taught how to formulate questions when they do not know or fully understand content. And they need to be nurtured so that they will develop the confidence to do so. One way to build this confidence, according to J. T. Dillon, a foremost authority on classroom questioning, is to remind students that “if they are able to frame a question about a concept or fact, they already have at least two thirds of the answer.”
Effective questions create cognitive dissonance - having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs of attitudes. This raises curiosity to a level where they are unwilling to remain ignorant about the issue. As a result questions are asked - resulting in learning.
Questions are important to authentic learning. Francis Hunkins states: “Questions should be tools that students employ actively in their learning, not just some device” that teachers or others in authority use to prompt student talking. According to Hunkins, “Students need to be in the driver’s seat regarding questioning.”

7. How does a question stimulate student thinking?
Thinking Strategies
How does a question stimulate student thinking?
40%
(Quilt pg 13) How does an educative question stimulate student thinking?
J. T. Dillon. Dillon => educative question as one that is: (1) purposeful, (2) clearly focused, (3) carefully conceived, and (4) well formulated.
These well-crafted questions stimulate student thinking in a myriad of ways. But most significantly, they serve as stimuli that prompt students to make connections between and among facts and understandings, and to use these connections either to solve a problem or to develop an insight.
Francis Hunkins suggests that a shift in thinking about the role of questioning is important as we attempt to help students meet the challenges of our ever-changing world. He suggests that questions are vehicles by which we create concepts, invent relationships, and judge the worth of phenomena generated—all at the core of thinking.
Teachers can give information to students, but students have to engage in a dialogue with themselves and with the material given in order to make sense, to create meaning. Students have to pose questions to think. In addition to posing questions about content, students need to learn how to ask questions about their own thinking (to be more metacognitive)—questions such as (1) What sense can I make from this information? (2) What value does this information have for me? (3) How can I utilize this information? (4) How must I change this to relate it to where I am in my life?
(Quilt Pg 14)
Questioning, as a process, is at the core of all widely recognized thinking strategies, including (1) problem solving, (2) decision making, (3) metaphoric thinking, (4) creative thinking, (5) critical thinking, and (6) conceptualizing.
By helping our students become better formulators of educative questions, we can assist them in mastering these types of thinking. We can help students by modeling good questioning ourselves and by coaching them in their efforts at questioning.

8. (Quilt pg 112)
We now turn our attention to the actual posing of the question.
J.T. Dillon reminds us to ask the question with care and tact. Four guidelines:
Ask with interest in the student’s answer (not with interest in getting the answer you want).
Punctuate the question (proper pauses) Ask questions slow and easy, paying attention to punctuation. Even the most carefully crafted and formulated questions require punctuation—pauses for commas and semicolons and emphases on key words. Remember that we have thought through the question already and students need time to determine just exactly what is being asked.
3. As you are asking, stop and think with the students. Anticipate student responses based on what has gone on previously in this class. Take time to scan the classroom to make a judgment as to whether most students are attending and understanding.
Remember to ask only one question at a time. Pause after asking so that students may have think time. Avoid rapid fire and double barreled questions.
Art of Asking

9. Directed vs. Undirected Questions
(Quilt Pg ) We have an incredible collection of questions. How we present the question can be the hook to engage students.
What do you think is the difference between directed and undirected questions? Pause
Before you answer that… Put your hand up if you think the question I just asked is “directed?”
So before I take an answer 1st = undirected, 2nd = directed. Take a couple suggested answers.
The directed question is one for which the teacher designates a respondent or method for student response. This should be done after the question is asked and after the teacher has paused (three to five seconds as we discussed last session). Teachers may use a directed question in conjunction with signals, in which case the teacher would ask all students who had an answer to signal by raising a hand, putting thumbs up, etc. The teacher would then probably call on a student who signals “yes, I have an answer,” but is free to call on a student who does not signal yes and to use prompts to extract an answer from this unwilling respondent.
Likewise, the teacher may indicate that students are not to signal because he or she has predetermined who will answer which question in today’s class. The choice is the teacher’s. Refer to norms.
The undirected question allows students to call out their responses. Such a question may also pass to one of the volunteers.
What are the relative advantages of directed vs. undirected questions?
Allow participants to discuss this issue for as long as seems productive. Be certain to use wait times, redirects, etc. Some of the advantages to directed questions that will likely emerge are
teacher retains control
   students are aware that they are always on call
  teacher can match question difficulty with student achievement level—dipsticking—as Madeline Hunter would call it (ask a lower level student and if s/he knows the answer you can make a reasonable assumption that the high achievers do as well.)
teacher can assure that a maximum number of students are involved in responding
Given that the teacher makes an overt decision regarding who will respond (that it is not left to the most vigorous hand waver or, by default, to the only willing volunteer), who do you think we direct most of our questions to?

10. …not more questions, better questions and questioning
Changing Direction
…not more questions, better questions and questioning
techniques.
(Quilt Pg 15)
Quality questioning does not promote asking MORE classroom questions. To the contrary, in all probability, those focusing on effective questioning practices will pose fewer questions to their students. The questions will be better—educative questions.. And their questioning techniques will be informed by what research has to say about effective questioning techniques.

11. Q uality uestioning Materials adapted from QUILT curriculum:
Henrico County
Public Schools
Questions?
Materials adapted from QUILT curriculum:
Questioning and Understanding to Improve Learning and Thinking