Blog Post 4

What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher?

Effective teachers know how to and will stimulate the minds of their students. Students will attend class and leave knowing more material than they knew when they went in. However, more often than not, new material can be challenging and students may have many questions about it. Sometimes, students will ask these questions, but occasionally, they will avoid asking questions for a few reasons.  In these cases, it is up to the teacher to provoke the question process. When teachers ask their students questions, they promote and improve learning in their classroom!


Questioning Techniques: Research Based Strategies for Teachers is a website I found that talks about the importance of asking questions. This website says that questioning is a widely used teaching strategy, second only to lecturing. Teachers ask many different types of questions (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) for a number of different reasons. Some of these reasons are to involve students in the lesson, increase motivation, develop critical thinking skills, nurture insights, asses achievement, and many more.
According to Asking Questions to Improve Learning, there are quite a few guidelines teachers should follow when asking questions. Teachers should plan their questions to correlate with lesson plans and course goals. Teachers should never ask more than one question at a time; this tends to confuse students. Teachers should have in their notes when they will pause during the lecture to ask questions, and what questions they will ask at these times. When the teacher knows what questions he or she will ask and when, they can make the classroom more interactive and can better measure student learning.
All in all, there are many ways for teachers to be effective. However, a sure way for them to measure student success and create student interactivity in the classroom is to ask questions! When students are engaged, they are more eager to learn. When they are more eager to learn, they perform better in class: thus making the teacher more effective. So never be afraid to ask questions. Usually, the question is more important than the answer.