Higher Level Questioning

Laurian Phillips
Jun 30, 2008

When it comes to asking good questions during the distributed summarizing part of the lesson, sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the same questions we have always asked. When examined more closely, these questions tend to utilize lower level thinking skills. 

To combat this problem, one teacher offered a suggestion. She put up question stems on a poster at the back of the room to remind her to ask better questions. These can be obtained from the Learning-Focused Extending Thinking Flipchart and can also be found in all of our books. Good questions, such as, "Why did you use that strategy?  What would happen if ___?  Can you explain to your partner___?" will help elicit more thinking and discussion than "Who is the main character in this story?  What operation would you use to solve this problem?" 

Questions should be thought out ahead of time and written in the lesson plan, but a poster might also allow for additional questioning and serve as a reminder to distribute summarizing throughout the lesson, not just at the end. This teacher suggested that it helped to remind her to do more with pairs. She said that it also was a visual to remind her to look back at her lesson plan to ask those great questions that she created to use during her lesson.