Discussion Procedures of Questions in Teaching Essay

Teachers who use questions efficiently can confirm to the fact that students become more interested and keenly involved with learning when they feel free to express their thinking skills and when they can question, examine, and argue about different aspects of the topic within reach.

In line with this, questioning is an important part of teaching because of its possibility to fuel students thinking and learning. According to Jackie Acree Walsh, and Beth Dankert Sattes (2004), teachers could use questions for the following purposes, all of which are relevant to direct instruction:

1. To increase interest and motivate students to become aggressively involved;
2. To assess students’ activity and verify on homework or classroom work;
3. To build up critical thinking skills and inquiring attitudes;
4. To evaluate and review prior lessons;
5. To raise insights by exposing new relationships;
6. To evaluate success of instructional goals and objectives;
7. To encourage students to pursue knowledge on their own (p.3)

Questioning forms an essential part of most strategies for efficient teaching. It is an important module of teacher clarity (Hines, Cruickshank, & Kennedy, 1985) because it is a means by which teachers can gain feedback on learner understanding.

Questioning can be used to keep the students on task and to support them to engage in meaningful learning. Questioning can be a vehicle for introducing variety into lessons, and a means of enabling even slow learners to experience some success in their learning.

Feedback is essential to learning and/or improving proficiencies. Feedback can reveal learners’ strengths, discover areas needing improvement, and concentrate on ways to improve learners’ performance.

With the aim of providing a valuable feedback during classroom discussions, teachers use the method of probing which is generally regarded as one distinct feature of questioning. Probing is the method of seeking explanation or more information when a learner attempts to answer a question. For example, a teacher could ask learners to clarify or justify their answer, or to give more details on it, or to be more specific.

Probing learners in order to get good feedback is the greatest result on student success when it is part of a cycle of attempting to explain answer, asking for additional information, and redirecting the question to another student.

Follow-up question is one that probes the response to either a basic or supporting question. It is used by teachers to draw out additional responses from the students. Using follow-up questions is the most effective strategy a teacher has to make sure that responsibility for advancing and evaluating arguments in the discussion remains with the students.

Follow-up questions act as a useful tool for the teacher to direct “traffic” during a classroom discussion. A good teacher listens keenly, looking for correlations between the responses offered by the students. Follow-up questions are used to make those relationships perceptible to the students and to explore their meaning. As a result, follow-up questions provide a way for the teacher to get the students to talk to one another.

B. The importance of using a climate that encourages students to ask further questions and compare opinions, knowledge, and experiences with others, is that, supportive climate allows or encourages students to ask further questions and compare opinions, knowledge, and experiences with others (Martin, Myers, & Mottet, 1999).

Though, this should not be seen as an obstacle, but as a way of enhancing teaching. Another important part of this is getting students to feel that their views and feelings will be respected by the teachers and by other students. It also helps students to feel secure in order to be willing to express ideas that may trigger disagreement and criticism.

Reference List

Hines, C. V., Cruickshank, D. R., & Kennedy, J. J. (1985). Teacher clarity and its relationship to student achievement and satisfaction. American Educational Research Journal 22(1), 87-99.

Martin, M. M., Myers, S. A., & Mottet, T. P. (1999). Students’ motives for communicating with their instructors. Communication Education, 48(2), 15.

Sattes, B. D., and Walsh, J. A. (2004). Quality Questioning: Research-Based Practice to Engage Every Learner. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.