4 Encouraging the students to ask questions
A first step to helping your students raise questions is to stimulate their interest by giving them direct contact with materials that raise their curiosity. This is not as difficult as it may seem, because students will be interested in many things they have not seen before or in a group of objects that you would not expect to be together. Objects that have a particular meaning for your students might also raise their curiosity and provoke discussion.
The more you do this, the better will be the quality of the questions that your students raise. The first kinds of question that students will ask are ‘Why have you brought them into the class?’ and ‘What are they going to do with them?’
Case Study 2: Mrs Pandya encourages her students to ask questions
Mrs Pandya, working with Class IV students, is starting work on devising and using criteria to identify the many different species of plants and animals found around the school and in the community.
I decided that the first step I had to take with my students was to develop their understanding of the key features of plants and animals. They could then use this as the basis for looking at the similarities and differences among a collection of living things. In the first lesson I explored with them the common features of animals. To do this, I collected together a lot of pictures of animals found in India that I cut out of magazines and newspapers. I displayed the pictures on the wall, so that everyone could see them, before asking the students to talk with their partners about what questions they could ask about all the animals. My class is used to working in pairs. The pictures I used were of a tiger, elephant, cow, monkey and a horse.
After a few minutes I asked for volunteers to suggest questions, which I recorded on the blackboard. Then I asked them to explore how they can sort the animals using their questions as criteria for classifying them. The questions ranged from things like which animals were the same colour to whether the animals gave birth to live young. Their criteria that arose from their questions included the following similarities: a head, two eyes, a mouth, teeth, nose, nostrils, tails, four legs, body and skin, which I listed on the blackboard.
Next I asked what differences they could see between the animals when they looked at the pictures. The students responded with colour, size, shape, skin and different patterns on their skin as examples. Next we discussed which features were best for sorting the animals into groups and how we have common features. I suggested that we vary among ourselves but that we all belong to the same group (i.e. humans), and therefore have common features. In the next lesson I plan to bring in some more pictures of different types of birds, especially local birds, and ask the students to think what criteria they could use to differentiate such a variety of birds so that they see how much more detailed and closer they have to look when sorting and classifying one group of animals or plants.
I was pleased with how interested my students were in talking about how to group animals and the quality of questions they raised.
 Pause for thought How could you do something like this with your students? |
Deciding which questions to answer and which ones to use to lead into investigations is your professional judgement. It is not always possible to do investigations for every question, but giving students the time to raise their own questions pushes them into thinking more deeply about any topic. For that reason alone, it is a worthwhile activity.
Activity 3: Raising questions with your students
Think about the next topic you are teaching your class. Gather together a collection of objects that will provoke their curiosity. Depending on the age of your students and the topic you are studying, these could be some simple toys, a collection of seeds or a collection of different types of leaves.
- Decide how you will organise the students. Are you going to be working with the whole class or one group at a time? See the key resource ‘Using groupwork’ in Resource 5, especially the section on ways to plan and organise groups.
- Ask your students the simple question, ‘What would you like to know about these objects?’
- Give them time to talk either in pairs or in small groups about the objects and ask them to write down their questions about what they want to know.
- Ask your students to display their questions on the wall or take it in turns for each group to feedback their questions.
- Write their questions on the blackboard and ask them if the students can answer any of them. Someone else in the class may be able to answer for them, or you can.
- Tell them that the rest of the questions will be answered as they study the topic. Leave the questions on the wall or note them down so that you can return to them later and students can see what questions they have answered.
- Ask if they enjoyed the exercise and why.
After the lesson, look more closely at the questions and identify those that could be answered by students from their textbook or other science books, or by investigating their ideas.
Pause for thought
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 Video: Using questioning to promote thinking |
Watching the video will help consolidate some of the ideas you have met in this unit.
3 Categorising students’ questions