Effective Key Inquiry Questioning in Competency Based Curriculum
Questioning is one of the teaching techniques that teachers use most. Questions can develop critical thinking in learners if skillfully handled. You can accomplish many instructional goals through Questioning.
Questions are any oral or written statement which requires a response or an answer.
Classroom questions are different from questions in real life. Teachers ask questions they know the answer to. In real life people only ask questions when they don’t know something. Questions should not just require recall of facts, but also serve other purposes in the classroom.
Q. What do you think are some of the uses of questions in teaching and learning.?
ü Developing thinking skills
As you give knowledge to the children, you ask questions on what they already know. Here you are developing the thinking skill of recall. For example, if you are teaching about the Counties in Kenya you would ask:
· What is the name of our County?
· What is the name of our Sub- County?
After your learners’ responses, you would then go on to introduce new aspects of the topic.
You need to also ask questions which aim to develop higher level thinking skills. These questions should help your learners form relationships and put things together in new or original ways.
For example, if you were teaching about mixing substances you could ask:
· “What do you think would happen if you mix water with oil?”
This question is much more open and all children can attempt an answer. You can challenge and stimulate a child’s thinking through questioning
ü Stimulating interest
You can also stimulate your learner’s interest and curiosity through questions. For example, telling the children the story of the man, the leopard, the goat and the cabbage. You could ask questions as follows:
· Could the leopard and goat be put together?
· How many journeys would the man have to make to get all across safely.
This is a problem-solving question which will stimulate interest and develop problem solving skills. Similarly, you can also use questions as a warm up activity and to involve the learners.
In a reading lesson on a passage called “The Health Centre” you could ask the following questions:
· Where do you go when you are sick?
· Who takes care of the sick people there?
ü Applying information
You can use questions to help your learners apply and practice information they have learnt. For example, you might have taught about proper nouns. You could then ask the question:
“ Can you give me four sentences with examples of proper nouns?”
After teaching about characteristics of vertebrates and non-vertebrates’ animals you could ask:
“ Which animals are vertebrates?”
ü Evaluating
Questions are also important as they can help you assess your learners learning. Let us look at the following situations. You have been teaching your Learners the factors to consider when starting a business. At the end of the lesson, you could then ask:
“Which do you think is the most important factor that may influence a person to start a
business in an area?”
ü Guiding
You can also use questions to give guidance to your learners as they learn. This can be when you are helping learners to organize facts so as to make sense of them. Examples of such questions are:
· What is the first stage in carrying out long multiplication?
· What do you notice about the way the salt has mixed with the water?
· What resources will you need for the investigation?
Effective questioning.
There are four strategies you can use to make questions more effective. These are:
1. Pausing
Read these case studies which highlight the importance of these strategies.
a. Mrs. Nyarangi comes to class and asks children to take out their books and write an answer to the question. “ What is four times six?” She the immediately, asks the Learners: “Who has written the answer?”
b. Miss Suneka asks a question and then picks on a child to give the answer. When the child hesitates, she moves on to another child.
What do you think about the approaches the teachers used?
§ In both instances, the teachers don’t pause to give the child time to think. Mrs Nyarangi’s case, some children would not even have their books or pens ready. You should use pausing to help your Learners organize longer and more thoughtful responses. You may need to give learners time to prepare .
§ Research shows that by waiting longer for the child to answer, the child is far more likely to respond, and also give a much more thoughtful response.
2. Prompting
When you use prompting, you phrase your question by breaking up the idea to lead to the final answer you expect. You give your learners a prompt to help them answer the question. For example:
Teacher: Can you tell us about your science investigation?
Learner: Eh, well
Teacher: What were you trying to find out?
Learner: If plants need light to grow
Teacher: What did you do first?
In this way the teacher is helping the child to structure their input.
3. Probing
You can use probing questions to improve your Learners’ initial response to your questions. Probe require more precise and detailed answers and they encourage children to think and make links. For example:
Teacher: What was the man carrying?
Learner: He was carrying a bag.
Teacher: What type of bag was it?
Learner: It was large and made of leather.
4. Refocusing
When your learners give the right answer but it is not the response you expect then you can ask a refocusing question. For example:
Teacher: What is a lion?
Learner: It is an animal.
Teacher: What type of an animal is it?
Learner: A mammal.
Here the teacher may have wanted the learners to give the answer “mammal” first, but they gave the first answer as animal. It was not wrong, but the teacher wanted them to be more specific if they could, so the teacher asked a refocusing question.
Qualities of a good question
The best questions are those which are well thought out in advance. They should be:
§ Clear, brief and direct
§ Thought provoking
§ Open
§ Suitable to the age, abilities and interest of the Learners.
Think about your key Inquiry questions.