Mike’s Blog
Strategies, Ideas and Insights for Teachers and Leaders
Tag: questioning strategies
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One activity you and your learners can benefit from repeatedly, and a second that delivers collaborative learning that is almost guaranteed to work every time
Question Set Work with your class to develop a set of questions that can be used again and again when doing a specific type of task. Learners can then use…
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A questioning activity that is pure Sherlock Holmes and a second that takes learners on a journey from easy to (fiendishly) difficult
Detective Inspectors Divide the class into groups of three. Give each group a number (you might want to make this really clear by printing large numbers on sheets of paper…
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Serial questioning: why one thing usually follows another, and what that means for you and your learners
Questions often come in a series during a lesson. Examples of this include when the teacher is questioning learners one-on-one, when they are leading a discussion or when they set…
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How to take your classroom questioning and start thinking about it as a diagnostic tool for assessment
Questions elicit information and we can use questions as a diagnostic tool. To diagnose something is to identify, detect and establish. It involves eliciting information that can be compared to…
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Five powerful strategies expert teachers use to practice exam-style questions with their learners
Practicing exam-style questions is one of the key steps to assessment success. Here are five activities you can use with your students. Give every pupil a slip of paper and…
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Using questions to challenge, probe and provoke (and how that can swiftly change the dynamic in your classroom)
Questions do things. They have more power than most statements. They cause people to act. Here we will look at four specific things that questions can do and that are…
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Easy-to-use, tried and tested techniques for effectively differentiating your questioning in any lesson you teach
We can use questioning to differentiate in any lesson, at any time. The simplest way to do this is to vary the difficulty level of the questions you ask. Here…
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Some simple strategies for using questions to stimulate meaningful discussions
Discussion is a superb addition to any classroom. It gives students an opportunity to develop and interrogate ideas, arguments and theories. It allows pupils to learn from and with one…
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Understanding the fine-grained differences between oral questioning and written questioning – and how you can use these to your advantage
It is important to be aware of some of the differences between oral questioning and written questioning. This is so that teachers can achieve the most effective outcomes when using…
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Why making knowledge provisional transforms how learners hear your questions
Here are some beliefs that, in various societies and at various times, have held sway: All these beliefs have been subsequently disproved. Yet, at one time – and in some…