Training guide

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2. Questioning to promote thinking

2.4. Good habits to form when using questions in your lessons

Try to do the following:

  • give learners time to think about their answer
  • ask different types of questions
  • sequence the questions
  • listen to learners’ responses and give follow-up questions
  • ask other learners to correct wrong answers
  • plan some good questions in advance. If you don’t you are more likely to limit yourself to closed, low level questions.

Things to avoid:

  • asking a question and answering it yourself
  • asking a difficult question too early
  • giving learners no time to think
  • ignoring answers
  • asking the same learners in every lesson
  • ignoring the efforts of slower/shy learners.
Activity 1.8: Reflecting on teaching

After you have used different questions in three or four lessons, reflect on your experience with one or two of your colleagues – the ‘good habits’ and ‘things to avoid’. Did you manage to establish some good habits? Did you manage to avoid the pitfalls? Make notes in your Teacher Notebook.

Effective questioning can be combined with all the classroom approaches that will follow. Try to establish the habit of planning your questions – particularly open-ended ones – and keep practising the different ways of responding to learners.

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