Questioning Strategies

Ann Monroe Assignment: Try a new questioning strategy and write about how well it worked.

I'm a big time procrastinator, so last Friday, when we were given the assignment to try a new questioning technique this week, I was thinking that I would totally get it done… eventually. Wednesday rolled around, the week quickly drawing to a close, and I still hadn't done anything. Not only had I not tried something yet, but by  the time I got home from school on Wednesday I had once again forgotten all about it. Thursday morning came, and as I was walking into school I realized that it was just about my last time to try cold calling, the technique I most wanted wanted to try. But as you can probably guess, it wasn't in my lesson plan and that meant it wasn't going to be happening. On Friday I was doing a review game, so without the opportunity to try cold calling, I had to try the muddiest part of the lecture technique. At the beginning of the period, I told everyone to write down anything that we had covered this week that they were still confused about and that if we had time after the game we would start to go over some of it, and if not, I would cover it all before the final. I didn't get a chance to reteach any of the things they were confused about, but my review did cover everything on the test and I definitely learned something from trying the new technique.

My fear was that I would get twenty-five different responses as to what the students were confused about since everyone learns and absorbs information differently. To my surprise, there were only a few topics that had eluded them, a collection small enough in size that it could be retaught in probably less than twenty minutes. I guess that's assuming though that they didn't underrepresent what they were confused about. In the future I'll stress that they shouldn't put their name on it, so that hopefully the anonymity will ensure a student doesn't purposefully not write something to avoid embarrassment. Despite the fact that I waited until the absolute last minute and even though I didn't use the method I was most excited to try, I still learned a couple things from the whole experience and I'm most likely going to try the technique again. I may even try cold calling, despite the fact that it's no longer required. 

Read and post comments | Send to a friend