Questions are the heartbeat of our classrooms – stimulating thought, promoting retention, and demonstrating understanding.
Questions are a powerful tool that teachers can use to unlock knowledge, move understanding from surface to deeper levels, and generate curiosity.
However, fostering a culture where students actively want to answer questions can be challenging and there are many barriers that can lead to a lag between asking a question and receiving an answer.
In some cases, the answer might not arrive because the barrier is too much for some students to overcome. In this article, we will explore the importance of building a questioning culture and provide practical strategies to inspire student engagement and participation.
A scaffold for learning
Questions are not just tools for assessment of learning; they can act as a scaffold between teaching, knowledge retention, and learning.
When students are encouraged to ask questions and share their thoughts, they not only have opportunities to retrieve knowledge, but it also provides opportunities to develop oracy and self-regulation, creating foundations for becoming owners of their own learning.
When teachers create classrooms that have a strong questioning culture, it leads to a number of benefits, which can include:
- Encouraging active participation: When students become comfortable asking and answering questions they tend to be more engaged in the lesson. This engagement leads to improved comprehension and retention of information.
- Building confidence: When students feel valued and supported in their responses, their confidence grows. This self-assurance extends beyond the classroom.
- Strengthening communication skills: When students are encouraged to actively participate through asking questions and providing answers, it helps students to develop effective communication skills.
Barriers to answering
Before we look at how we can cultivate a questioning culture to build student engagement and participation, let’s reflect on some barriers that can cause a lag between asking and answering a question.
- A fear of failure: Some students in your classroom may avoid asking or answering questions out of fear of being wrong or appearing “unintelligent”. They may prefer to be perceived as lazy rather than lacking in knowledge because they fear being embarrassed.
- Peer pressure: Peer pressure is a powerful influence determining whether a student is willing to contribute during a lesson. There can be times when peer-to-peer relationships break down outside of school or just before your lesson which can determine their degree of confidence in putting themselves out there.
- Feeling shy: There might be times when your students feel uncomfortable asking and answering questions because they are naturally quiet and do not want to have attention drawn to them. This means they will hide away from contributing and will just get on with the task set. Without realising it, these students can become lost in the lesson.
The learning environment
A crucial starting point for teachers to use questioning as an effective pedagogic tool is building a conducive learning environment where there are positive interactions between teacher and pupils.
There are three core interactions in the classroom: teacher to groups of pupils; teacher to an individual pupil; and pupil to pupil. A conducive classroom environment will build a culture that allows for all of these types of exchanges to occur.
Liu (2001) identified four types of student behaviours:
- Full integration: Students actively engage in the lesson and often know what they want to say and what they should not say.
- Participation in the circumstances: Students contribute at appropriate times often influenced by factors such as socio-cultural, the environment, relevance of the lesson.
- Marginal interaction: Students act as listeners and speak out on rare occasions.
- Silent observation: Students tend to avoid any oral contributions in class.
There are a number of ways we can work to address these barriers in our classrooms and aim for Liu’s idea of full integration.
Normalise errors
Create a community in your classroom where every student understands that making mistakes is a natural part of learning. Narrate this at the beginning of the academic year for students that you haven’t taught before and drip-feed this throughout the academic year to remind them.
“In this classroom we work together as a community showing respect for one another. There will be times when you might get an answer wrong or you are unsure if you have the right answers. This is nothing to worry about and is all part of learning.”
Precise praise
Give specific praise to students when contributing to questions even if the answer is not correct. It is important we acknowledge that the answer is not correct but also provide praise for their contribution, so we reinforce the strategy of normalising error.
- Teacher: “What is saltation… Adam?”
- Student: “It’s the movement of particles by them rolling along the riverbed.”
- Teacher: “Thank you for your contribution, Adam. You’re right that saltation is a transportation process, but the particles don’t roll along the riverbed. What else can you remember about how bed load moves in the river channel?”
Peer support
Create opportunities for turn and talk moments in your classroom where students have the opportunity to talk to their peers before being asked to provide a response to the whole class. This can reduce the fear of failure because they have had the opportunity to discuss their ideas. During this turn and talk, you can actively observe the discussions to be strategic in your cold-calling of students after the turn and talk.
Final thoughts
Building a questioning culture in your classroom is a challenging process that requires patience, empathy, and dedication.
By addressing the common barriers that create a question lag as described above, you can create an inclusive and engaging learning environment where students actively want to participate and engage in discussions and share their thoughts.
Promoting a questioning culture is not just about answers; it is about fostering curiosity and critical thinking. When students feel safe and valued, they are more likely to embrace the opportunity to ask and answer questions, creating a vibrant and dynamic classroom environment.
Next time
In part two of this three-part series, I look at building a questioning culture and using questions to enable responsive teaching. This article has now published and can be found here.
And then in the third and final part of this series, I consider designing powerful questions that go beyond surface knowledge. Read this article here.
- An experienced school leader and principal examiner, Michael Chiles has been teaching for more than 15 years. His latest book Powerful Questioning: Strategies for improving learning and retention in the classroom (Crown House Publishing, 2023) is out now, Visit www.crownhouse.co.uk/powerful-questioning
Further reading
Last term, SecEd published a five-part series written by Matt Bromley and focused on creating a questioning classroom.
- Part 1: 13 techniques for teachers: Published November 1
- Part 2: 38 Socratic questions for your teaching: Published November 8
- Part 3: How to encourage debate and discussion: Published November 15
- Part 4: The purpose and timing of questions: Published November 21
- Part 5: Practical questioning techniques: Published November 28
Further information & resources
- Liu: Asian Students Classroom Communication Patterns in US Universities: An emic perspective, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.