Good Questions

Without a doubt, the most difficult part of running a discussion-based classroom is asking good questions.  Of course, you need to have good questions, regardless of whether you're preparing for a project or daily discussions. And one of the difficulties many of us have is that we never received any training on how to write good questions.  In fact, I have yet to meet a teacher in any discipline who had "how to write good questions" as part of their undergraduate or graduate education program.

We can work on this over the summer, preferably working with others, receiving feedback, learning from and with one another.  You know, living and modeling what we want the kids to do in our classrooms.  This takes a good bit of planning and preparation, and is worth it if you have the time.  In fact, I'd highly recommend it.

However, there is another part of "asking good questions" that often gets overlooked: Asking questions on the fly during the discussions.  Courtesy of our education training or our experience - or both - we ask one, maybe two follow-up questions during our classroom interactions with students, after which we jump to giving them "the answer", often for the sake of time.  For a discussion-based classroom to be successful (or, in my opinion, for any classroom to be successful), we need to give the students more processing time, and we need to train ourselves to encourage this by asking more and better questions during the discussions.  These are difficult to plan for, since how much progress the kids make, and what kind of progress they make, will vary from day to day.  Actually, it will vary from period to period, and from kid to kid.

So, how can we work on this vital skill over the summer?  Here's my suggestion: During every conversation you have, with everyone, try to ask just one additional question of the other person.  Try to make the questions a little deeper, trying to get to  know the other person a little better by pursuing a topic they are interested in, allowing them to naturally expand the conversation.

Then, in the fall, keep this in mind as you have conversations with the kids, both in the hallway and during the content conversations in class, allowing the kids to expand the conversation as much as possible, but interjecting with questions as needed to continue the expansion.

Trust me, it's well worth it, both for the sake of the kids learning the material, and for the sake of building a better relationship with the kids.