EFFECTIVE questions are ones for which students actively compose acompose a response and thereby beome engaged in the learning process.
Their effectiveness depends onvoice inflection, world emphasis, word choice and th context in which the qustion is raised. Questions can be raised inmany ways and each way can detrmne whether th question is erceivd by your students and how.
In almost any classroom at any time you can bserve a sequence of events in which the teacher structures the content to be discussed, solicits a student’s response and then reacts to the response. Their activities performed in sequence are the most common behavior in any classroom.
They were first described by Bellack, Kliebard, Hyman and Smith (1966) as the following chain of events:
The teacher provided structures, briefly formulating the topic or issue to be discussed.
- The teacher solicits a response or asks a question of one or more students.
- The students response or answer the questions.
- The teacher reacts to the student’s answer.
The teacher’s behavior in this chain of evenrts compose the activities of structuring, soliciting and reacting. At the heart of this chain is sliciting or question-asking behaviour. Questions are the toolfor bridging the gap between your presentation of contentr and the students understandiing of it.
Presented such as advance organizers. Guided practice, feedback and correctives, inductive and deductiv logic, self-evaluation, discussing and so on.
Classrooms and content can become boring it a teacher fails to hav students do something with the content as quickly as possible after presenting it.
This is why the effective teacher intersperses questions throughout a lesson and wraps them around small bits of content to actively engage the students amd evoke a response, consequently, the cycle of structuring, soliciting and reacting in the most frequently occurring chain of events in any classroom.
Furthermore, 80% of all school time is devoted to questions and answers. But as noted, not all questions are effective questions. That is, not all questions actively engage students in the learning task.
By: Ms. Amelinda A. Fandialan | SSPI | Lamao National High School
