🚀  Guide To Questioning (Resource)
Channel: @TeacherToolkit 
Date: 30/04/2023

In the introduction to Guide To Questioning, I estimated the number of questions that a teacher poses on a daily basis in their classrooms, and why, using explicit strategies that are embedded as part of our teacher DNA, we can learn to automate some of these techniques.

Through routines, teachers can improve their effectiveness and reduce workload. The result? We can hold students to account by designing efficient strategies to regularly ‘check the learning’ that supports the teaching process more methodically.

The choice to write this book was consciously identified after publishing my last book, Guide to Memory (2022). Why? All teachers accumulate curriculum wisdom and develop a range of classroom management strategies to help the teaching and learning process. 

Through years of experience, teachers learn the art of teaching by accumulating thousands and thousands of internal idiosyncratic decisions, each time refining their strategies to improve their effectiveness. Once this is achieved, the classroom – at least on the surface – looks calm and effective and the teacher can start to enjoy their classroom space. 

For some (although not all), they discover the science of teaching, i.e. how we learn so that we can use this information to help make the learning process more efficient, by considering neurodiversity, types of memory and cognitive load. When this blend of art and science comes together, the teacher’s experiences and what they now know about cognitive science in the classroom improve many of the techniques they have used for years, to a point where decisions are made more consciously. These micro-decisions are made, calculated, considered and manipulated to such a degree that nothing is left to chance.

It is my belief that when a teacher has accumulated a wide range of questioning strategies and they know how learning happens, they can then pose a wide range of questions that hook, hold to account, support or hinder challenge, or motivate students at any one moment. This ability to select a suitable questioning strategy and pose questions in such a way as to elicit insightful student responses is nothing short of the work of a genius!

Blog explainer: https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2023/04/24/developing-classroom-questioning-culture-month-by-month/

This resource download: https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/product/questioning-month-by-month/

More inside the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1472989384?&linkCode=li3&tag=teach09-21&linkId=fded27dbfb4962d19a458f3b208bbb85&language=en_GB&ref_=as_li_ss_il 

Any questions, email Support@TeacherToolkit.co.uk