Using effective questioning
Teachers use effective questions to monitor learning and cause student thinking.
What is using effective questioning?
Teachers use questioning to:
- deepen student thinking
- gather information about what students know, understand, and can do.
Student responses inform effective decisions about teaching and learning. Teachers use strategies to support all students to participate and share their thinking.
Effective questioning strategies cause all students to think. This creates high engagement classroom environments which improve student achievement (Black and Wiliam 2018).
What could it look like in the classroom?
- Giving wait time, using strategies such as using a countdown timer, or a ‘think, pair, share’ activity
- Respond to answers by redirecting, probing and or reinforcing
- Predict explain observe explain
- A no hands up approach with all student response routines (William 2014)
- Dylan Wiliam’s Question Shells
- What Makes You Say That (PDF) (harvard.edu)
What it isn’t
- Questions thought of ‘in the moment’ that ask for simple recall
- Always quizzes, or written responses
- Questions asked and answered quickly, without sufficient wait time
- Inappropriate level of difficulty – too hard or too easy to cause thinking and elicit responses.
Further reading
- Wiliam D (2014) The right questions, the right way, Educational Leadership, 71(6):16–19.
- Maths in schools podcast (15 June 2023) Teacher and student questioning that targets explicit concepts and processes.
- NSW Department of Education (2022) Effective teacher questioning.
- Black P and Wiliam D (2018) ‘Classroom assessment and pedagogy’, Assessment in Education Principles Policy and Practice, 25(1):1–25.
- Wiliam D (2014) ‘The right questions, the right way’, Education Leadership, 71(6): 16–19.