Questioning

Reflective and Study Tasks

 Reflective Task 1
First steps: ask yourself about your current
practice in relation to questioning
•How would I describe my approach to questioning?
•Do I encourage my students to ask meaningful questions?
•What types of questions and how many questions do I typically ask in my teaching?
•What purposes does my questioning serve?
•Do I ask questions to encourage higher-order thinking?
•How would my mentor describe my questioning?
•What is the best example of questioning that I have tried?
 Wragg’s (1993) study found teachers
commonly use three types of question:

Reflective Task 2 Management-related, e.g. ‘Has everyone

finished this piece of work now?’

What kind of Information recall-related, e.g. ‘How many

questions do you sides does a quadrilateral have?’

ask?
Higher-order questions, e.g. ‘What evidence
do you have for saying that?’

Wragg E (1993) Questioning in the Primary Classroom. London: Routledge.

Study task 1
• Study a lesson that you have taught recently in TP1 and evaluate your use of
questioning.
• Produce an improved lesson plan that focuses on the implementation of several
questioning strategies or approaches that you have learned in this section.
• Clearly outline the questioning strategies that you intend to use in bold on your
lesson plan.
• Perhaps discuss your use of questioning with your mentor.
Study Task 2
For TP2, produce a
lesson plan that
highlights effective
questioning and
incorporates
Bloom’s Taxonomy.
 Reflection 3 – use of questioning
Answer these questions by reflecting on your first teaching practice.
• Do your questions reinforce/ revisit the learning objectives?
• Does your questioning engage pupils in thinking for themselves?
• Do you involve all pupils?
• Do you model for pupils the sort of questions they might want/ need to ask?
• Do your questions show connections between previous and new learning?
• Do you ask pupils to explain their thinking?
• Do you provide other, extending questions: ‘What other alternatives did you
consider? ‘Why did you reject them?’ ‘What makes this choice the best?’
• Can you encourage upside – down thinking by asking for the opposite point
of view, or an outrageous alternative?
• Do you stage or sequence questions with increasing levels of challenge?
• Do questions feature in your schemes of work and lesson plans?