Effective Questioning

In short, questioning is crucial because it is our mechanism of identifying if learners have understood the knowledge that we shared with them, in the way that we intended them to. This makes questioning for teachers a very unique skill: most people ask questions because they want to find something out that they don’t already know. 

Rosenshine’s study found that asking questions more often increases the effectiveness of a teacher. However, his research indicated that to maximise this effectiveness, teachers should use questioning to specifically check for understanding. Many of the questioning strategies covered in Module One can be used for this purpose, but there are other techniques that we will now cover that can be deployed for this purpose.