The following skills will help learners achieve more:

• Prompting to help learners develop and improve their answers. You might first choose to say what is right in the answer and then ask further questions and give other clues. For example, ‘so what would happen if you added a weight to the end of your paper aeroplane?’.
• Probing to find out more, helping learners to clarify what they are trying to say to improve an answer that is partly right. For example, ‘so what more can you tell me about how this fits together?’.
• Refocusing to build on correct answers and linking learners’ knowledge to what they have previously learnt. For example, ‘what you have said is correct, but how does it link with what we were looking at last week in our local environment topic?’.
• Sequencing questions in an order designed to extend thinking. Prepare questions that stretch learners, but do not challenge them so far that they lose the meaning of the questions. For example, ‘explain how you overcame your earlier problem. What difference did that make? What do you think you need to tackle next?’.
• Listening helps you to not just look for the answer you are expecting, but to alert you to unusual or innovative answers that you may not have expected. It also shows that you value the learners’ thinking and therefore they are more likely to give thoughtful responses.
• Rewarding correct answers with follow-up questions that extend the knowledge and provide learners with an opportunity to engage with the teacher. You can do this by asking for:
• a how or a why
• another way to answer
• a better word
• evidence to back up an answer.