Sunday, September 29, 2013

Blog Post #6

Why do we ask questions? Teachers generally ask questions to make sure students understand the material being taught to them. Another reason questions are asked is to help the class be more interactive in the lesson. Most students have a hard time paying attention and questions help keep them on task. The questions asked ultimately depend on the material being taught. You should always ask questions pertaining to the material and try your best to stay on topic.
What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher? Teachers should avoid asking “yes or no” questions. If asking a “yes or no” it is important to have another question as follow up. Planning the questions that you intend on asking is a great way to help with this. Open ended questions are the ideal questions to be asked in a classroom. These questions help students be more interactive and get them thinking. Asking one question at a time is also very important. Bomb rushing students with different questions will leave them confused and they won’t know where to start when answering them.
Try to be specific in asking questions. Since there is a goal in which you would like to meet when asking a question never be vague. Vague questions will only further confuse your students. I cannot count the times a teacher asked question that no one in the classroom understood. In one of my English classes this is all my teacher did. We once spent a week talking about one person, but then my teacher asked “Who is he?” Well you can see that there would be many answers to this question.
As an educator it will be crucial that you plan ahead the questions that you want to ask. The questions asked will depend on a lot of things like your class, the goal of the question, the material gone over, and much more. Sometimes, if questions are asked in the proper manner, the students will start asking their own questions. This is always a good thing because every teacher should aim for their class to be interactive.
One figure thinking of a question and another figure thinking of the answer.

2 comments:

  1. Demetrius,
    I thought your blog post was very well-organized and easy to follow. I liked how you had the different headers in bold so you could see the two topics broken down. You did a great job of explaining the importance questions in the classroom. I liked how you said that students sometimes have a hard time paying attention, so asking questions can help this.

    Great job!

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  2. "In one of my English classes this is all my teacher did. We once spent a week talking about one person, but then my teacher asked “Who is he?” Well you can see that there would be many answers to this question. " Did you use this example from the source you provided? You should clarify why this is a bad question. Elaborate on your example.

    The source you provided about vague questions was very helpful. Thank you for sharing.

    "As an educator it will be crucial that you plan ahead the questions that you want to ask questions." Did you mean to leave off the last word in this sentence (questions)?

    "Sometimes, if questions are asked in the proper manner, the students will start asking their own questions. This is always a good thing because every teacher should aim for their class to be interactive." This is always a VERY good thing!

    In my classroom I am observing in now, I love when the students ask the teacher questions. Not only are the students getting an answer to what their curious about, it helps the teacher see his/her question from the students point of view. The teacher can make notes and the next year or even the next class (if they switch classes for different subjects, periods, etc.) use the students questions to better ask his/her own.

    What are some different ways of asking questions? There is the obvious "closed-ended" and "open-ended" questions, but did you find any other forms of questions? They're out there!

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