Teachers share ideas for how questions can be effectively used to engage students and check they've absorbed information
Questioning in the classroom: Get students to question the questions you ask, says Chris Curtis. Photograph: Alamy
Harry Fletcher-Wood, head of History and CPD co-ordinator at Greenwich Free School: @HFletcherWood
Using hinge Questions: I would not have believed that a major improvement in my teaching last year would have involved employing multiple choice questions. As I learned, however, multiple-choice hinge questions are a sophisticated and invaluable assessment technique to swiftly check whether the class has understood a critical point before moving on.
Crucially, the teacher designs responses to ensure student answers unambiguously demonstrate their underlying reasoning.
As a history teacher, for example, I might wish to know whether students appreciate what I mean by 'significant.' If I asked, 'what is significance?', one of the responses I would offer would be 'achieving something which improves people's lives'. Students frequently perceive significance to be synonymous with greatness and therefore would not deem a tyrant significant.
By designing each choice to represent a different line of reasoning, it is possible to immediately identify misunderstandings and take corrective action. If a lot of students have fallen into this trap, I may offer a brief example, or if it's a handful of pupils, I might have individual conversations. The hinge question is a key tool in ensuring students have understood a topic before a lesson ends.
David Doherty, has worked in a variety of roles in middle and secondary schools over the last 17 years: @dockers_hoops
Be creative with your questioning: Teachers ask around 400 questions every day, which adds up to a staggering 70,000 a year. Most of these are low cognitive questions and it's important to consider how to make these questions more effective in developing pupils' learning.
One way is to add variety to you questioning strategies. For example, randomly select pupils – there are many apps to help with this – so the same pupils aren't always answering questions. This also helps keep the class focused, as they don't know who's going to be chosen next.
Another idea is to vary the type of question you ask. Closed questions are fine when you're testing recall, but open questions allow pupils to explore a range of possible answers. The use of the word 'might' in a question also achieves this, as it removes the idea that there's a definitive right answer.
Lastly, well planned questions allow you to stretch all abilities in the class, as you can target questions at pupils based on their level. It also allows you to involve more pupils by playing volleyball with answers as you pass the responses around the room to other pupils.
Chris Curtis, English teacher and literacy co-ordinator: @Xris32
Question the questions: If you have been a teenager or have shared a house with a teenager, there is one thing you know: they question everything. Yet, we never really build this into lessons. Rarely do we get students to ask the questions. More importantly, we never get students to question the questions. Teenagers love questioning parents. Why were you late? Why didn't you pick me up, dad?
Aim to have occasions where students question the questions. For example, the question 'why did Shakespeare write about Othello losing control?' could lead to the following questions: What is losing control? What is Shakespeare trying to say about losing control?
Don't ask questions at the end of giving information: Intelligent people ask questions continually, yet the structure of lessons often revolves around learning followed by questions. Read this and answer the questions. Try to get students to ask questions throughout the learning and not at the end, where valuable opportunities are missed. Students often blank out words they don't know when reading, when they should be asking a question.
Harry, David and Chris were all speakers at a recent edsessential Teaching and Learning Takeover.