Effective Questioning- Professional reading

Professional Reading on ‘using effective questioning to raise achievement in reading’ Effective Literacy Practice (ELP) years 1-4 Notes of interest: 1. Strategic and purposeful questioning is crucial to students’ literacy learning 2. At a metacognitive level questions can be used to build students’ awareness 3. It can be an ideal way to generate thoughtful discussion 4. It can help students build the habit of becoming critically reflective e.g. How do you think… I wonder why… What have you noticed… 5. Well thought out questions can help a student get beyond the surface features of a text they are reading 6. We need to ask a range of questions and know why we are asking them 7. Questions become effective when- • They are directed towards helping students meet a learning goal • They are centred on and draw out students’ knowledge • There is adequate ‘wait time’ for students to think through their responses • Students’ responses are valued and not transformed by evaluative comments tha t suggest the responses are inadequate • Appropriate follow-up questions are used to extend students’ thinking 8. Effective teachers extend questioning well beyond the kinds of questions that only require students to feed back factual content or to make predictions that are purely speculative 9. Attending to the answers that students give is as important as planning and asking the questions 10. It is not necessary or even useful to plan activities based on categories of questions- the aim is to ask questions that reveal the students’ thinking, including any misconceptions or inappropriate assumptions that they may have 11. Questioning may unlock the understanding of a student who is struggling with an aspect of their reading 12. A teacher who uses questions effectively provides a good model to students and shows them how to develop their own questioning strategies. This helps them to bring a critical perspective to texts by asking purposeful questions of themselves as they engage with reading 13. ‘Comprehension strategies are specific, learned procedures that foster active, competent, self-regulated, and intentional reading.” Trabasso and Bouchard, 2002 14. Questioning helps to reinforce the habit of reading for a purpose 15. The T needs to help the students formulate appropriate questions , by modeling such questions during shared reading 16. Asking questions helps readers to engage with the text and with the author and with the reading task.