Joanne Chatterton EDE 605

Thought paper on Questioning at Home and at School: A Comparitive Study by Shirley Brice Heath Culture in Relation to Questioning. Heaths article was based on a study that was performed almost 40 years ago. Would the outcome be the same today? Has communication between adults and children changed or is it the same? In the study the teacher was white and the students were homogenously black. In classrooms that I have taught, the children are more diverse wherein there might be 8 or 9 different cultural backgrounds. How does this affect the way that teachers question and students respond? Do we need to be versed in all these cultural differences to be good teachers or can we teach and study individuals responses (or lack of) and adapt our methodology of questioning not by supposed cultural bias but by the art of human interaction? Do cultural norms play other kinds of roles in student response to questioning rather than just the way questions are framed? When I was reading the article it caused me to reflect on the interactions in my classroom and I realized that we do use questioning constantly whilst conversing in the classroom, in the way that Heath described, giving labels to things and discussing their attributes. In contrast, during literacy activities the questions are open-ended and are structured to elicit ideas, predict and use text to self connections. At the last parent teacher conference I was discussing a childs inability to answer open ended questions where he parroted the question back as opposed to direct questions that he was able to answer. Her response was Well when theyre little you talk at children, not with them. This took me by surprise but made me think about the effect of parent/child interactions on language formation. In the article Heath also described the way that Tracton adults did not really interact directly with children at an early age but modeled descriptive language constantly about and around them. This resulted in the children being able to answer more open ended question than direct questions. Since 1975 there have been a lot studies about effective questioning in the classroom. Questioning in the classroom has become a popular subject in teacher preparation courses but the idea of questioning to enhance critical

thinking is promoted more than the idea that culture plays a part in response to different ways of questioning. The type of questions that Heath described teachers using in the study are called IRE Initiate-Response-Evaluate. IRE format is often viewed as limiting students interaction and not facilitating complex interactions or meaningful exchange (Hall & Walsh, 2002). Teachers are encouraged to use Blooms taxonomy to elicit higher order thinking.