Asking good questions in the classroom

Teachers ask a great many questions in a school day, and many of them are quick recall checks: "What's the capital of Peru?" "What did we call this last week?" Those have their place. But the questions that make students think tend to be fewer, slower and more open, and they depend on what the teacher does after asking.

Wait

The single most researched habit in classroom questioning is wait time. In the 1970s the science educator Mary Budd Rowe recorded teachers' questions and measured the pauses. Teachers commonly waited around one second before calling on someone or answering the question themselves. When teachers extended that pause to three seconds or more, students tended to give longer answers, more students volunteered, and more of them backed up what they said.

Wait time feels awkward at first, which is why it takes practice. Two things help: count silently to five after asking, and tell the class you're going to wait ("I'll give everyone a few seconds to think before anyone answers").

Ask open questions about thinking

Recall questions check whether students remember. Open questions check whether they understand. A few shapes work across most subjects:

• "How do you know?"
• "What would happen if we changed ___?"
• "How is this like ___, and how is it different?"
• "What's an example that doesn't fit the rule?"
• "How would you explain this to someone in a younger grade?"
• "What evidence in the text supports that?"

Many teachers use frameworks such as Bloom's taxonomy to move questions from remembering facts toward applying, analyzing and evaluating them. You don't need the framework to use the idea: after a recall question, ask one that makes the student use the fact.

Follow the answer

What happens after a student answers matters as much as the question. A quick "Good" closes the conversation. Keeping it open usually works better:

• "Say more about that."
• "Who agrees or disagrees with Maya, and why?"
• "How did you get there?"
• "Can you find the sentence that made you think that?"

Ask these after wrong answers and right answers alike. If the follow-up only comes after mistakes, students learn that "how did you get there?" means "you're wrong."

Let everyone answer

Calling on raised hands means the same few students do most of the thinking out loud. Alternatives:

• Think, pair, share: students think alone, talk to a partner, then a few pairs report.
• Mini whiteboards or cards, so every student answers at once.
• Calling on students at random (with the option to "phone a friend") after wait time, so everyone prepares an answer.

Teach students to ask

Children arrive at school full of questions. Our article on why kids' questions matter covers the research on just how many. The number tends to fall as school goes on, partly because there's little room for it in a packed lesson.

You can make room. One well-known approach, the Question Formulation Technique developed by the Right Question Institute, has students produce as many questions as they can about a prompt, without stopping to judge or answer them, then sort them into open and closed, change a few from one type to the other, and pick the ones they most want to investigate. Even a shorter version, ten minutes of writing questions before a unit begins, gives you a list of what students actually want to know.

Questions to avoid

"Does everyone understand?" is the classroom version of "Any questions?" Students who don't understand rarely say so in front of peers. Ask them to show it instead: "Write one sentence explaining this in your own words" or "Solve this one example and hold it up."

Guess-what-I'm-thinking questions are the other trap: questions with one exact answer the teacher has in mind, where students guess until someone hits it. If you find students guessing, rephrase the question so several answers could be good ones.