Teachers ask questions for many instructional reasons including keeping students' attention on the lesson, highlighting important points and ideas, promoting critical thinking, allowing students' to learn from each others answers, and providing information about students' learning. Devising good appropriate questions and using students' responses to make effective instantaneous instructional decisions is very difficult. Some strategies to improve questioning include planning and writing down the instructional questions that will be asked, allowing sufficient wait time for students to respond, listening carefully to what students say rather than listening for what is expected, varying the types of questions asked, making sure some of the questions are higher level, and asking follow-up questions.
While the informal assessment based on spontaneous observation and questioning is essential for teaching there are inherent problems with the validity, reliability and bias in this information (Airasian, 2005; Stiggins 2005). We summarize these issues and some ways to reduce the problems in.
Problem |
Strategies to alleviate problem |
Teachers lack of objectivity about overall class involvement and understanding |
Try to make sure you are not only seeing what you want to see. Teachers typically want to feel good about their instruction so it is easy to look for positive student interactions. Occasionally, teachers want to see negative student reactions to confirm their beliefs about an individual student or class. |
Tendency to focus on process rather than learning |
Remember to concentrate on student learning not just involvement. Most of teachers' observations focus on process student attention, facial expressions posture rather than pupil learning. Students can be active and engaged but not developing new skills. |
Limited information and selective sampling |
Make sure you observe a variety of students not just those who are typically very good or very bad. Walk around the room to observe more students “up close” and view the room from multiple perspectives. Call on a wide variety of students” not just those with their hands up, or those who are skilled as the subject, or those who sit in a particular place in the room. Keep records |
Fast pace of classrooms inhibits corroborative evidence |
If you want to know if you are missing important information ask a peer to visit your classroom and observe the students' behaviors. Classrooms are complex and fast paced and one teacher cannot see much of what is going on while trying to also teach. |
Cultural and individual differences in the meaning of verbal and non verbal behaviors |
Be cautious in the conclusions that you draw from your observations and questions. Remember that the meaning and expectations of certain types of questions, wait time, social distance, and role of “small talk” varies across cultures (Chapter 4). Some students are quiet because of their personalities not because they are uninvolved, nor keeping up with the lesson, nor depressed or tired. |
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