With the passage of time and the growing generation of Z in short Gen Z, I have been challenged with engagement more than with content. Despite the content and studies receiving high approval and attainment rates the classroom lacked life and thought at times and the efforts to engage the class felt at times artificial especially online.
I am turning to questions that encourage a range of responses and discussion hopefully. Skilful questioning: The beating heart of good pedagogy by Johnathan Doherty (2017) discusses the various approaches to framing the taxonomy. I wanted to remember Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956), later revised by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) and the trigger words which I am certain will help me ask the right questions depending on what I would like my students to do with a task or activity. The table format suits me well as I respond well to structure and guidance, and I will use this when designing a learning activity next.
The classroom ideas that are proposed sound feasible but will need some practice and time to construct and design. I will need to allocate time for this and hope that I can create the space to experiment. Strategies I am already doing in class are:
- No hands up, Anyone can answer, which avoids the same few students answering questions.
- Ask the expert, The teacher puts questions to a student on a given topic, extending this to encourage other students to ask questions.
- Ask the classroom, The teacher displays a number of written questions to stimulate thinking about pictures or objects in the classroom.
- Think-pair-share, Allows time to share ideas with a partner and respond to a posed question (Doherty, 2017).
I am hoping to dispatch those more targeted in the future. Other strategies I want to try soon are:
- Eavesdropping, When groups are working, the teacher circulates around the classroom and poses questions to groups based on what is heard in their discussions.
- Here is the answer, what is the question? Deliberately back to front to encourage out-of-the-box thinking (Doherty, 2017).
I will try those deliberately and take note of their success in my classes. It would be good to compare the online and the physical spaces with those techniques.
I have with the text realised that I use Dialogue teaching (Alexander, 2017) in my practice while we work out a process or shine a light from different angles onto a problem and I believe I can further enhance this by asking skilful questions in the process.