QUESTIONING / DISCUSSION
PROCESSES

Lecture | Questioning/Discussion | Team Teaching | Thematic Teaching | Integrated Curriculum | Cooperative Learning

Questioning (along with lecture) is the most common instructional practice. In typical learning situations teachers talk (lecture) and pose questions, or students are asked to read something and then the teacher asks questions about what the students have read. What teachers usually want to do when they question is to have students discuss a topic to gain more depth of insight and/or a broader understanding of the topic. As an instructional strategy questioning, if done appropriately, can be quite good. Teachers, however, quite often use the strategy inappropriately or poorly. Teachers, in their planning, often fail to "plan" the questions they will ask during the lesson or the process they will follow when asking questions. Coming up with the right question on the spur of the moment, means the teacher has to be able to think well "on the go." This is a difficult task for most teachers, which results in questions that are not specific enough.

When asked, teachers usually say they ask questions of students to find out something about what they know or have learned. Flanders (1970) has some interesting things to say about this aspect of teacher questioning. In his research on classroom, teacher-student interactions, two-thirds of the interactions that take place between the teacher and students have to do with on-task behaviors. During this two-thirds interaction time, Flanders finds that teachers talk two-thirds of the time, and two-thirds of this "teacher talk" is providing feedback to students or asking questions of students; and teachers use four ways of providing feedback or questioning. These are directional (giving directions to students), controlling (dealing with issues of classroom behavior), motivational (encouraging students to think more depth or to continue looking), and rhetorical (asking a question and then the teacher answering their own question).

Generally, there are two levels of questions, lower-level questions and higher-level questions. Lower-level questions are questions that have one "right" answer. Higher-level questions are questions to which there are many possible answers that are "right." As mentioned above, teachers ask questions to find out students know about a topic. Typically, teachers say they and the students are having a "discussion." Quite often, however, what teachers refer to as discussion is actually recitation. Dillon (1984) explains the difference between recitation and discussion. Recitation questions can be lower-level questions or higher-level questions, but such questions involve the teacher and a student. Recitation questions include review, drill, guided discovery, inquiry teaching, and using Socratic questioning. Recitation has its place, but recitation (which is the common questioning process) is not discussion. In recitation, students know that if they are asked a question, it will have little to do with a previous response. As a result, students pay limited attention to responses from other students. If the teacher wants to have "discussion," they must structure the questioning process in such a way that more than one student (usually three or four students) respond to the same question, which means that teachers need to begin with higher-level questions. Additionally, discussion takes planning.

Reference

Dillon, (1984).
Flanders, N.A. (1970). Analyzing teacher behavior. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.