We have all had that experience of knowing someone, whether it be in our personal or professional lives, who seems to talk and ask questions just to be heard. As educators, we should strive to make the direct questions we ask of our students effective and meaningful. There is great value in the use of open-ended questions where students are asked to dig deep and make their own connections to the topic at hand, however now I would like to consider strategies used to as effective and direct questions of your class. In their Literacy and Numeracy initiative, the Ontario Ministry of Education, published the Asking Effective Questions in Mathematics which can be accessed through the EduGAINS site. A number of helpful guides to higher level question-asking for the Math classroom are featured and one example of such is pictured below:
Posing such questions allows for the students to make connections and allows them to make inferences and draw conclusions based on their observations and their reasoning skills. The use of prompts provides the opportunity for the teacher to give the student the floor to use their own voices to work out a problem verbally, justify and support their thought process, and essentially, to think out loud. If we want to welcome literacy into the Math classroom a great start would be to keep encouraging our students by leading them in a way that they become comfortable thinking out loud.
Thank you for this resource. The questions pictured are certainly leading and meaningful. As a primary/junior educator, I have found that the school day is very rushed. We must quickly get through our lessons and activities in order to move on to the next subject. I struggle with finding time to allow the students to express themselves and have a conversation that turns into something meaningful. By incorporating these prompting questions, I think I would be able to guide the conversation in such a way that the students comments and discoveries are focused on the subject, rather than going off on tangents where it is difficult to bring them back.
ReplyDeleteI have always strived to incorporate open-ended questions into my lessons and make a point to not ask close-ended questions. I believe that these sorts of prompts are highly useful and can be used across all subject areas. I think that by incorporating these sorts of prompts we are also fostering the importance of discussion within the classroom. Students need to discuss and collaborate with their peers, have debates, hear other opinions and utilizing these prompts assists in this. Thank you for sharing!
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