Questioning in the Math Classroom

Questioning the students within a classroom is by far one of the most important aspects of teaching to engage the students in the subject matter and keep them thinking. Not too often do you hear about discussions and questioning being done in a Math classroom. Usually Math classrooms consist of students busying themselves with problems, but rarely ever does anyone ever take them to the next level by asking them open questions and creating discussions. Or maybe that was just my math experience?

Now that I am on the other side of the desk within a math classroom, I can now understand better why I didn't have any discussions or questioning being done. It's not all that easy in a subject that is so concept based that there is much further thinking that can be done. Or so I thought.

The Ontario Government has put together a fantastic resource on Effective Questioning in a Math classroom. This is a great way to open your Math classroom up to engage the students and get them using logical reasoning and critical thinking skills. Reasoning, proving, problem solving, and communicating are all mathematical processes that are required in Mathematics, so creating discussions and questioning it allows for these processes to be used and engages the students.

Even a questions as simple as "How else could you ...?" makes the students look at every problem more logically and use their critical thinking skills to expand on the same problem in multiple ways. This uses their problem solving strategies to bring them to another level of mathematics, rather than just knowing how to solve the problem but understanding it.

Effective questioning is key to an interactive classroom, and no matter the subject there is always a way to incorporate it in the classroom. I know I feel more confident about it now!