Sustaining Pace and Challenge - Part 2

This blog is Part 2 of 4.

You can access the other parts here:

Using Questioning to Challenge All Learners

We now turn to look at questioning in a little more depth.

First, we will think about how to challenge all learners, then about individual cases.

Good questions should provoke thinking.

Sometimes this thinking will need to be heavily circumscribed – such as when we are checking knowledge or testing whether a learner can apply an idea in a certain way.

However, as a rule, challenging questions are more open than this.

They afford multiple answers and rely on a degree of reasoning, creativity or critical thinking from the learner.

This means they provoke thinking of a more complex, and therefore challenging, type.

With this in mind, here are three simple ways you can ask challenging questions to all the learners you teach:

Big Question to Frame the Lesson

Instead of using a title as the basis of your lesson, use a question.

Make this a big question and explain to learners that, through the course of the lesson, your shared aim is to try to answer this. Immediately, the lesson becomes more challenging, especially if you spend a little time attending to your question, making sure it is sufficiently big and engaging.

As the lesson progresses, you can regularly return to the question to see how close learners are to being able to answer it.

Conceptual Questions

Base questions around concepts.

These are abstract ideas, such as change, right and wrong, or reliability, and therefore challenging to think about.

Every area of the curriculum has a guiding set of concepts. It is to these that specific content is attached.

Identify concepts relevant for the subject and/or age group you teach and use these as the basis for challenging questions.

Provisional Questions

Inserting the word ‘might’ into a question serves to make knowledge provisional.

Thus, ‘What is the answer?’ becomes, ‘What might the answer be?’

The second question is more stimulating than the first.

This is because it provokes speculation, reasoning and justification in a way that the first doesn’t.

Asking questions of this type – making them a norm in your lessons – helps to continually challenge all learners and sustain a good pace.

Using Questions to Challenge Individual Learners

We can also tailor our questioning, so it challenges individual learners.

This means we ask specific learners specific questions predicated on their prior knowledge and understanding.

The high degree of precision engendered by such an approach leads to questions that push learners to think more deeply than would otherwise be the case.

We can see this with a brief comparison.

In situation one we walk around the room and ask the same question to three different learners, eliciting three responses of varying quality.

In situation two, we walk around the room and ask three different questions to three different learners, each one informed by what we know about their current level of knowledge and understanding.

The second approach produces higher quality answers and challenges learners far more than the first approach.

Here are three techniques you can use to help tailor your questions to individual learners.

Observe/Listen then Question

During an activity, circulate through the room. Identify a learner who will benefit from having their thinking stretched.

Observe them working, observe their work or listen to the conversations they are having with other learners.

Use this information to inform the questions you pose.

This allows you to ask questions that are relevant, challenging and personalised.

Learners will also be able to immediately respond because your questions will connect to their current thinking.

Mark then Question

Another way to elicit information about where learners are currently at is through marking.

You can either mark learners’ work outside lessons or, if time allows, during the lesson.

In either case, having marked the work that has been produced, and therefore assessed it, you are well placed to ask a relevant, challenging question.

You can do this verbally, if you are in the lesson.

Or, if you are marking work outside the lesson, you can write down your question in the learner’s book.

If you do this, ensure that you also give learners an opportunity to write a response.

Opinion, Counter, Defend

Select a learner who is engaged in an activity and ask them to share their thoughts with you, or their opinion about the work.

Having listened carefully you must then pose a counterpoint.

This could be an alternative explanation, a different perspective, a different way of working or something else entirely.

The aim is to challenge whatever the learner has put forward.

Having done this, ask the learner to defend their original position.

This is challenging and should provoke the beginning of an evaluative to and fro between you and the learner.

We will continue our exploration of sustaining pace and challenge in Part 3, where we’ll look at Bloom’s Taxonomy.