A Question of Questioning

Simple isn’t always easy, and complicated doesn’t necessarily mean complex and difficult. I could say something straightforward like, “To improve your relationship, pay less attention to how you feel and more attention to what you do.” Simple! But easy to do, day after day? Not always. There’s a reason we have the expression, “easier said than done.”

Flip side: I could present you with a nearly $900 LEGO set with 7,541 pieces, that will allow you to recreate the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. Very complicated. Will take many, many hours to complete. Complicated? Undoubtedly. Complex and difficult? Maybe. I’m guessing it’s not too bad, though, given the fact that it provides step-by-step instructions and is meant for a wide, general audience. I mean, if it can be done “step by step,” it’s probably not that complex, whatever it is.

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There’s an aspect of teaching that I’ve been talking about and writing about and leading workshops about for several years, that I think is in the former category: easy to talk about; harder to do well. The reason I obsess about it is that I firmly believe doing it well can change everything in a classroom. It’s an educational reform that requires no new books, no new technology, and no investment in anything other than time. It’s all about how we ask questions.

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of building a culture of curiosity among students and encouraging them to ask questions, which they seem, statistically, to do less and less as they progress through the grades. But it’s the teacher’s questions that I’d like to talk about here.

There’s not as much research and chatter about teacher questioning techniques as you might think, given how much of a teacher’s time is spent (or should be spent) asking questions. The one principle that every teacher knows (whether they abide by it or not), is that it’s critical to respect wait time, a concept advocated by the respected researcher and guru, Robert Marzano.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Wait time can be important at several different moments: waiting after you ask a question to the whole class before you call on any students to answer; waiting for the response after you’ve called on a student, to give them time to process and think before moving on to a different student; waiting after they’ve given the response, before agreeing or correcting them, to give them time to hear themselves and reflect on whether they agree with what they’ve just said.

All of these are things the teacher in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” violates. And we laugh at him because boy, oh, boy, have we been in that classroom ourselves, at least once.

These different ways of waiting all show respect to students as learners and thinkers, and to the learning and thinking process itself. I’ve heard Marzano say that a teacher should wait ten seconds before responding or calling on another student. Many teachers will hear that and say, “Of course! I already do that.” But I bet they don’t. Try waiting ten whole seconds in any conversation you’re in, before responding to something someone else just said. It’s an eternity. Most of us hate it and become quite twitchy. Some of us have trouble waiting for the last person to even finish speaking before we jump in. I’m definitely guilty of that (I have a cultural explanation—but it kind of feels more like an excuse).

As I said, that’s the one thing most teachers know about—and many teachers violate it all day long What else is there to say about questioning?

Plenty!

The Probe

One of the problems we encounter in questioning is that teachers use questions as confirmation, not investigation. They ask a question that they already know the answer to (probably because they just taught it), and they want to see if the students “got it.” So they go surfing over the heads of the sitting students, looking for that right answer. And when they get it, they feel validated. On to the next topic.

What have they missed? Two things: the Wrong and the Shaky Right.

The Wrong is obvious—the students who remain silent or who give an incorrect answer. Too often, they are summarily dismissed as uninteresting and unimportant, as the teacher moves on to the next victim.

But wrong answers are often the most interesting, and pedagogically the most useful data in the room. Why did a student say “five” instead of “three?” Why did they think the event happened in 1861 instead of 1776? Where did that wrong answer come from? Pausing at the wrong answer to learn a little bit about how a student thinks can be hugely useful in helping a teacher guide and shape her instruction to be more effective.

And the Shaky Right? That’s when a student gives a correct answer, but, unbeknownst to the teacher, it’s not well supported in his thinking. Maybe he guessed. Maybe his friend whispered it to him. Or maybe he has the barest outline of the right concept, but there’s something not-quite-right in there, which is going to cause him grief down the road.

An example that John Bransford provides in his excellent book, How Students Learn, tells the story of an elementary school student who correctly tells her teacher that the shape of the earth is round, but who discovers to her shame, some time later, that it’s actually spherical, not flat like a pancake.

Learning from wrong answers and catching shaky conceptual understandings can both be remedied by taking a tiny bit of time to pause and ask probing questions—questions that ask students to unpack their thinking a little bit, to give the teacher a little insight into their thinking. Here are some examples of simple, straightforward, probing questions:

What do you mean?

Why do you say that?

How did you come to that conclusion?

Can you show me how you got that answer?

In the case of the girl, above, imagine if the teacher had paused to ask, “round like what?” She’d say something like, “round like a frisbee,” and the teacher would be able to say, “hold on a sec…” and correct the error that he otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

In the case of a wacky mathematics answer, a gentle “can you show me how you got that answer?” not only helps the teacher redirect a single student; it can also create opportunities for the whole class to explore error, as this teacher has discovered:

And why wouldn’t you want to explore error? Mistakes are interesting. They’re fascinating. They are, fundamentally, how we learn. Imagine a classroom culture where getting things wrong wasn’t shameful or embarrassing. Imagine a classroom where, as athletes have always known, missing a shot multiple times is simply how you learn the way to make the shot consistently thereafter.

The Turn

The turn is a slight variation on the idea of the probing question. A conversational “turn” is simply the engaged back-and-forth talk between an adult and a child, with very little time in between. It has been seen as a critical component of brain development in infants and toddlers, with huge benefits to IQ and social an emotional health in later years. It is very different from simple, directed speech, where a command is given by the adult and obeyed by the child. It is ongoing, conversational interaction.

In the classroom, this is a little different from the idea of waiting time, allowing a student to form a deep thought in response to a meaningful question. This is more like rapid-fire conversation, used to lead a child from one point to another through questions and answers. The benefit of it is that it allows a teacher to lay down a thought trail for students to follow as they think more deeply or broadly about a topic, rather than simply providing a factual response to one aspect of it and then moving on to an entirely different idea.

Compare these two conversations:

This one:

Adult: What is this animal?​

Child: It’s a bunny!​

Adult: Yes, it is. Good job.​

Child: I like bunnies--​

Adult: Now, what is this animal?

and this one:

Adult: What is this animal?​

Child: It’s a bunny!​

Adult: Yes, it is. And how can you tell it’s a bunny?​

Child: It has big ears.​

Adult: It sure does. Why do​ you think he needs those big ears?​

Child: So he can hear other ​animals coming to get him?​

Adult: Very good! And what ​else does the bunny have? What else do you see?​

Child: Big, big, back feet! So he can hop away!​

The second conversation includes several “turns,” which allow the teacher to push or pull the students along, helping them to think more deeply. Note that she doesn’t provide any new information to the student; she simply gets the student to think about what she already knows, to arrive at a new idea.

Another method of using conversational turns that I like is called, “Changing the Givens,” where the teacher swaps out a piece of information in a question after it has been answered, to ask a “what if” follow-up question. “What if it was a 7 instead of a 5?” “What if we subtracted instead of added?” “What if Atticus hadn’t shot that mad dog?” It allows a teacher to get extra mileage out of every question or problem, and allows students to see a question or an issue multi-dimensionally instead of as a single thing, disconnected from the rest of the world. To me, it’s a little like having students shine light through a constantly turning prism instead of a flat plane of glass.

So, if all of this is fairly simple and straightforward to describe, what makes it hard? Time. The luxury of taking a little extra time—to linger and explore, rather than racing off to the next thing on the checklist or the pacing plan. The whole idea of having a “pacing plan,” much less feeling married to it or oppressed by it, shows that something is amiss in the way we do schooling. We claim to love the things we teach, but we rarely have the chance to approach them lovingly. We have to cover stuff; we have to “get through it.” And that often makes it difficult to pause and ask that second question—which is often where a student gets the “aha!” moment that makes learning worthwhile. We’re structured for checking things off a list and passing a certain number of tests, not for facilitating “aha!” moments. We could do better.

It’s not complicated, necessarily. Just difficult.

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