Maximising Your Questioning

By Michael Paulus

As part of Humanities, staff members give short and snappy weekly CPD sessions to the rest of the departments. I wanted to showcase what I felt was a really simple way to structure effective questioning in lessons that aids differentiation, provides retrieval practice to aid memory, supports classroom engagement and increases learners’ self-management through reflection.  In this blog post, I have summarised my CPD on Questioning. Enjoy! 

Scenario: I have just taught costs & profit calculation topic to my year 11 Business students last week. Here is a list of what I covered with them:

As you can see some of the content is more manageable (e.g how to define and give examples of start-up costs), and some content requires a variety of skills, such as calculation of profit based on figures given. Based on this prior learning, I wanted to start my next lesson with a series of questions that serve as retrieval practice and AfL, So I devised this structure to serve as my ‘DO NOW’:

10-Retrieval Questions

1. LPA Q1:  

2. LPA Q2: 

3. MPA Q1: 

4. MPA Q2: 

5. Context-based (linked to a situation, scenario etc)

6. HPA Q1: 

7. HPA Q2: 

8. CHALLENGE (high skill/knowledge question)

9. DEEP (a deep thinking-type question)

10. META/SOC (questioning that requires reflection, metacognition on the content and the wider syllabus)

(NB: I wouldn’t include “LPA Q1” etc on the board!!!!!)

So if I apply the ‘10-Retrieval Questions’ structure to the Costs & Profit topic above, it may look like this in my next lesson!

Other subject areas were also able to apply my 10-Retrieval Questions structure really quickly and successfully for a recent topic they taught:

I’ll end this post with an assortment of ways you might want to try in your lessons to enhance your questioning, which can and should be one of the most interactive and fun aspects of your lesson if you get it right:

• Pre-plan who you might choose before posing the question (but don't say the name first!)
• Rank order (either written or orally) the questions to increase in difficulty
• Give plenty of thinking time before selection (Don’t be afraid of silence!)
• “What is the counterargument for…?” or Can/did anyone see this another way?”
• Relate questions to a situation/scenario/context
• Questioning that asks students to consider deeper connections across topics/subjects
• Consider how you might sequence 2-3 questions that build on each other as they are answered
• Questioning on their self-efficacy towards a topic; “Which key term do you find the most confusing and why?”
• Using your lesson’s (obscure) Key Question to pose as your final question of the lesson
• ‘If this is the Answer... What is the Question?’
• ‘What if...?’, ‘Suppose we knew...?’ and ‘What would change if...?’
• Why do you think this is right….?
• Students devise questioning for peers/other groups
• Question the question: “Why do you think I asked that question?” or “Why was that question important?”