Jaime-Lee, Head of Netball at WHS, explores the journal article ‘Questioning for Learning in game-based approaches to teaching and coaching’ from the Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education
Harvey, S. and Light, R. (2015). Questioning for Learning in game-based approaches to teaching and coaching. Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education, 6 (1): 1-16.
‘Questions that encourage players to reflect on what they have just done will increase learning’.
A Games-based approach is just one pedagogy used in the teaching of PE. It is focused around practice through play, where players learn and refine skills while participating in matches. As skills are not broken down and taught individually, questioning becomes an important part of the learning. In order to achieve a Games-based approach, the PE teacher needs to move away from the traditional direct instruction teaching to open-ended questioning within the game of play.
The Games-based approach draws on 2 theories of learning – ‘The Zone of Proximal Development’ and ‘Complex Learning Theory’. The Zone of Proximal Development looks at focusing questions in the gap between what a player can learn on their own and what they can learn with direct teacher guidance. Complex Learning Theory focuses on the idea that learning is a combination of the mind and body.
Examples of good questioning in a Games-based approach:
How are you deciding when it is best to lead for the ball?
How could you improve your off-the-ball defence?
What is the most important thing to think about when deciding who to pass to?
What might happen if you do not receive the ball on your first drive?
Questioning needs to be open and give the player the opportunity to reflect on what they have just done. For players to show skill progression, they need to understand why they were successful/unsuccessful and how they can improve. For example, if a player is struggling to get free on a centre pass, rather than saying, ‘if you dodge it will help you get free’. Try, ‘how can you get free from your opponent?’, followed by ‘what if that does not work?’.
When done well, a Games-based approach allows players to not only make decisions independently but also to adapt to new or changing situations as they arrive. The use of well-constructed targeted questions will increase a player’s knowledge beyond where they could have reached on their own. The key is to ask open-ended questions at a point in play where reflection can occur.
Mr Richard Bristow, Director of Music and SMT Secondee, explores an article from Music Teacher Magazine looking at the idea of establishing ‘desirable difficulties’ in the way we use questions and approach tough concepts.
‘For music teachers, there are four overarching strategies that are most useful for introducing desirable difficulties into a music education context – recall practice, interleaving, the spacing effect and elaborate & listen’.
Passey’s impressive article quickly discusses some very useful strategies that musicians, working in the classroom, practice room or (eventually!) on the stage, can employ to help our learners overcome struggles and difficulties in our lessons. At the heart of this is often the ‘teacher as expert’ message which can be problematic to our learners, as they can so often see how effortless we, as professional musicians, can make something, whilst they are struggling with achieving the same technique. So much of this is linked to the way we present information. As Passey argues, it is far better for long-term memory to engage learners by active questioning and quizzes than to simply give them the information, where up to 50% of the information gets lost in future recall.
The recall strategy is something musicians use frequently; whether this is leaning specific exercises like scales or learning entire pieces from memory, as many of our scholars and performers at the WHS Young Musician events do. The huge benefit, as Passey summerises, is that finding learning something from memory difficult helps to reinforce the strength of the memory, ensuring the memory remains active and accessible in the future. The questions we ask are central to this; the learner might find playing from the score easier initially, but needs to be encouraged, through questioning, to see the development of their musical skill as being the ultimate goal.
The discussion on interleaving was also great to read, building on work we as staff have been doing on this in WHS recently, but with the benefit of close subject-specific focus. This involves switching between many different by related tasks, forcing the brain to make links with multiple pathways (‘desired difficulty’) rather than learning something in a ‘massed practice’ way, where the same bar or passage gets repeated over and over, forming a single pathway. I really like the idea of having interleaved practice sessions, where learners switch between playing pieces, exercises and aural skills to see the links between them and develop musical skills. Perhaps switching between instruments would provide even more connection, and I’m now wondering if asking my choir to perform their parts on instruments could really aid their musicianship. Again, the questions we ask form the backbone of creating links and avoiding potential cognitive overload and confusion.
The spacing effect is also another area where musical skill can benefit other subject learning. Long term recall is hugely helped by doing smaller amounts of practice regularly rather than lots of practice once a week. The same is surely true of exercise, and, as we head into Lockdown 2 at the time of writing, is something I am going to try to do more of!
The final passage, titled elaborate & listen, was for me the area that will have the most impact on my teaching, whether in the classroom or on Teams. I really enjoyed the idea of transformative improvisation – where you take an idea and improvise around it – as this is something that is useful to the performer, composer, and musicologist. Extending this by altering the style we perform in (‘try learning this passage of Mozart, but playing it in a Ragtime style’) can also be useful to develop these neurological pathways, and again something that readily transfers from practical performance to composition and the written word. The idea of listening is also vital; when we ask a question, how often do we actually listen to the answer? Sometimes the best question is one that gives the learner space to talk about their experience, vocalising the connections they are perhaps starting to make.
Regardless of the subjects we teach, and how we teach them, the idea of ‘desirable difficulty’ is an excellent one that comes from the questions we ask in our contexts. Celebrating challenge by asking difficult questions and enjoying the journey of learners answering with increased fluency is something to be relished.
Article title: An upward curve
Author: Guy Passey
Featured in: Music Teacher Magazine, October 2020 (accessed through the paper mag, not online)
This Friday Gem comes from Dan Addis and the Classics department
There are several different ways you can incorporate some physical movement into your questioning of students.
Simple use of physical movement in multiple choice questioning. Simply labelling each direction as an A or O you can ask the students to hold their hands straight in the air and lean to the side they think is correct and say either “AAYYY” or “OOOH”.
Creating physical gestures with aspects of understanding so that questions can be done using physical gestures rather than words.
E.g. Mark Wilmore connects the Latin verb endings to a physical gesture “-o = I (thumb pointing at own chest), -s= you (s) (finger pointing away), -t = he/she/it (thumb pointing to the side)”. The question then can be asked or answered by gesture rather than vocally.
E.g. Catriona Irvine adopts a pose connected with the meaning behind a grammatical point (Superman pose for the Subject doing the action and crossed arms for Object receiving the action)
This can also be used to prompt students in their answers and to help model correct answers for students.
Kinaesthetic questioning is effective because
It helps students strengthen storage in long-term memory, as the variety can help increase the number of neural pathways connected to certain aspects of knowledge.
It helps interleaving as it is a quick and easy way to start or end a lesson to remember previous material.
It requires students to focuson the front of the class rather than at their device, which helps ensure engagement in the lesson.
It helps all students focus, especially those with ADHD, by adding a physical component, especially important in KS3 groups where they are not moving around between lessons
In example 1. It helps students stretch their lumbar area and helps improve posture.
It encourages students who don’t want to speak up to demonstrate their knowledge, as well as allow for easier assessment of knowledge in the group.
It’s FUN! Fun to do, fun to watch. Just generally fun.
Points to bear in mind
Ensure students understand the rules and boundaries you want in place before such activity. They will get excited but if the rules aren’t clear they can become raucous.
We hope you enjoy some physicality in your lessons!
Dr Clare Roper, Director of Science, Technology and Engineering at WHS, looks at how advances in information technology have removed the barriers that often limit the scope for school students to embark on their own innovative authentic scientific research.
I was sitting in a lecture at Oxford University about 18 months ago when it suddenly became clear to me that the factor most often restricting school students from undertaking their own authentic research had evaporated and was no longer an issue.
Classroom science experiments commonly involve replicating known scientific phenomena to backup discoveries that are well documented in the scientific literature. Unfortunately, quite often we cannot even so much as replicate the data from a science textbook in a school laboratory because the data collection is too complex. Instead, we might explore the scientific process taken by a research group as we unpack a beautiful classic experiment and marvel at their discovery and how it has shaped our understanding of scientific concepts . A personal favourite is the magically simple experiment of Meselson and Stahl which elucidated how exact copies of DNA are created each time a new cell is formed [1]. At the end of a lesson exploring their experiment, it is customary to have a look at photographs of the scientists and perhaps consider how they may have come up with their experimental design.
Above: Meselson in his lab, 1958
I often ponder whilst looking at a black and white photograph of a scientist with his unrecognisable equipment, how this person might be perceived by the students sitting in front of me in our shiny new STEAM tower. Is this what being a scientist entails? Even after removing the stereotype of the person themselves, there is the barrier of the often sophisticated machinery and the hours of patient work required to collect sufficient data to make meaningful conclusions. I have no doubt that although we can enjoy the simplicity of their experiments in class, it surely reinforces the notion that novel scientific research is something inaccessible and unattractive to many school students.
In sport, there are countless role models of young athletes competing on the world stage, with celebrated successes at their local schools. The same can be said of talented young actors, artists, musicians and even activists and politicians. But try to think of a brilliant young scientist who has gone on to become a world leader having had the opportunity to hone their skills and find their path whilst at school. The fantastic news that two leading female scientists, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, have just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on genome editing [2] will certainly go a long way to inspiring more female scientists to dream big. However, like most leading scientists, their first taste of authentic research came after entering university and most are often only recognised much later in life.
The good news is that a growing number of passionate science teachers have teamed up with academics and a variety of institutions to provide opportunities for young scientists. Most research projects require access to expensive machinery or software that is beyond the reach of a school science department budget, and even those projects that are possible often tend to focus more on one or two aspects of the scientific process and cannot give the students carte blanche to explore their own curiosities because of time or cost constraints. Nevertheless at WHS we jumped on board and our students have benefitted hugely from projects including ORBYTS, and IRIS.
While I was in that lecture at Oxford that I suddenly realised that the missing ingredient that has recently evaporated was the need for the sophisticated machinery, and along with it, the prohibitive costs, and lengthy time required to collect data. The lecture was given by Prof Stephen Roberts, who specialises in machine learning and data analysis. Talking to him after his presentation about how ‘big data’ has shifted the emphasis in many university research labs from classic experimental design and data collection, towards a notion of data mining confirmed for me that the vast array of publicly available big datasets means that this modern approach to the scientific method makes novel research a feasible venture for all school students.
Scientific research using a data mining approach is exciting in that the data already exists, replacing the need for laborious experimental testing. The phenomenal progress in the field of artificial intelligence has meant that individual lab-bench experimental datasets are being replaced with enormous datasets which bring with them greater authenticity to the results, and also the ability to explore an expansive array of research questions that were never possible before. Data is amassing quicker than tertiary-level scientists can analyse it, and so the potential for school students to pose innovative research questions of these big datasets is not only boundless, but also a welcome and untapped asset in the quest to answer the world’s most pressing scientific questions.
Above: The Scientific Method
Novel research already on the go at WHS
We have already embarked on this exciting journey. Our first venture has been a collaboration with AELTC and IBM, who have kindly provided us with access to a huge dataset from the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. Like all great research groups, and in true STEAM+ style, we bring together different skills. The creative powers of the unclouded vision of the young scientists, supported by our Director of Sport Ms Coutts-Wood’s expertise in sport science and my experience of data analysis, has meant than we are in the final stages of publishing our first scientific paper on the impact of serve speed on winning the point. How apt!
Two more groups started during lockdown. One group under the supervision of Ms McGovern (Head of Chemistry) in collaboration with the University of Bristol, has recently received a special award for their research on Air Pollution. The other group are drawing on the expertise at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Heidelberg, Germany and the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus outside Cambridge. Their research questions range from discovering the differences in proteins associated with immune function in red and grey squirrels, to determining which mammalian species do not have attachment sites for the coronavirus (SARS CoV-2) spike protein. These bioinformatics projects will be launched on the EBI website soon to allow other schools to join in as well. Watch this space!
Just as the new STEAM tower is about to open, so too are new exciting possibilities for our young imaginative scientists at WHS.
Above: Discussing exciting new findings in the STEAM tower
Dr Anna Field, teacher of History at WHS, explores an article from the journal Teaching History and how dialogue in the classroom can create layers of historical understanding
‘1069 and all that: the dialogic understanding of the Norman legacy in Chester’, Teaching History 175 (June 2019)
“…dialogue can be harnessed in the classroom and enable students to create meaningful connections between factual, conceptual, and contextual knowledge.”
Bird and Wilson’s impressive study investigates the role of classroom dialogue in the production and application of historical knowledge across a three-lesson Y8 enquiry on the Norman legacy in Chester. Using methods from sociocultural psychology, the authors argue that the students’ historical knowledge both shapes, and is shaped by, dialogic interaction in the classroom. How this is achieved, they contend, remains an understudied area. While the article’s focus is on classroom dialogue as a whole rather than questioning per se, the authors’ examples of classroom exchange demonstrate the importance of teacher questioning in the creation of explicit and tacit historical knowledge. The result is a carefully planned a well-executed consideration of the interaction between different levels of historical knowledge in KS3 pupils, which further suggests how dialogue can be harnessed in the classroom and enable students to create meaningful connections between factual, conceptual, and contextual knowledge. The authors largely succeed in their aim to shed light on the different ways to create these links.
According to Bird and Wilson, dialogue stimulates interaction and movement between layers of factual, conceptual, and contextual knowledge and thus promotes historical understanding. In the first enquiry lesson, the process gauging students’ knowledge unearthed misconceptions surrounding chronology. While the students could make inferences, it was clear to the teachers that deeper knowledge did not yet underpin those inferences, and was not yet at their ‘fingertips’ during class discussion. Transcripts of dialogue from the next two lessons demonstrated the importance of teacher questioning – ‘probing’ – in how students started to evaluate significance and generate collective knowledge. Teacher questions were guided by student inferences, using an open format that encourages students to use their explicit historical knowledge – facts, dates, events – to develop a tacit understanding of the ideas and beliefs that sources from this period reveal. The trajectory of questions can be traced from ‘wow, tell us more! What we learn from this’; to ‘how can we learn that information [from the sources]?’; to ‘why were they [the Normans] smart?’.
These questions generated a ‘moment of contingency’ in one pupil that guided the whole class to read the primary texts in a specific way. The authors showed that these interactions fostered a deeper and verbally explicit connection between ‘layers’ of historical understanding in the individual and the wider group. In the words of Bird and Wilson ‘in this way knowledge becomes dynamic, changing and flexibly understood rather than inert, static and brittle’, a key quotation which demonstrates the contribution their study makes to History education pedagogy.
Nazlee Haq, teacher of Maths at WHS, looks at the book Teaching Backwards and what it says about the teacher as detective and the power of metacognitive questioning
“Over a series of lessons, students should be asked metacognitive questions. These can be posed at any point in the lesson.”
Reduced face-to-face contact with students due to Covid-19 restrictions has highlighted how vital it is to get questioning right in the classroom to assess students’ understanding of the curriculum.
In ‘Teaching Backwards’ we learn that questioning is a tool for “looking for proof of learning”. The role of the teacher detective is to establish the quality and depth of learning that has taken place over a period of teaching. Teachers should also be able to forecast the types of questions students will ask, using the lesson plan as a prompt to do so.
As a teacher you know what you want your students to have learned by the end of the lesson, so that when they are assessed they can demonstrate a clear understanding of the concepts.
The right questions can act as proof as to whether students are on the right track to understanding content. Questions can take several forms:
To check for weak understanding
To create deliberate confusion to see how students deal with the challenge, although this tangential approach may not be appropriate for all students
Ask students to provide evidence for their answers
Help teachers to understand whether the students’ thinking process is robust and on track or not
Initial questions might be open, but also require students to provide support for their verbal answers. For example, “Tell me what you have learned so far about …..?” followed by, “Can you provide evidence for ….?”. By setting this type of expectation in questioning students, Hattie argues that teachers establish academic rigour in the classroom.
However, others have argued individual, pair, group or whole class that giving students ‘wait time’ is also valuable. By giving this allocated time students become increasingly skilled at giving detailed answers, enhancing the quality of their reflection.
Over a series of lessons, students should be asked metacognitive questions. These can be posed at any point in the lesson.
At the start, ‘Have you seen a problem like this before?’. Or during, ‘What part of this is easy/difficult to explain to someone else?’ and ‘What stages are crucial in explaining this concept?’ At the end, ‘How will you remember this learning?’ or ‘If you did this again, how could you do it better?’
I particularly liked this last set of questions as they prompt students to think about how they are working through problems.
Mrs Hattie Franklin, Head of Year 12 and Oxbridge Coordinator (Arts and Humanities), explores what learning at Oxbridge entails and how the Oxbridge and Academic Scholarship programmes can help WHS students with their applications and developing their attitude to their own intellectual curiosity and passions.
Oxford and Cambridge are two of the oldest and most famous universities in the world, ranked at the top of the league tables and justifiably revered for nurturing academia across all disciplines. The undergraduate offering is a world class education and students from all over the globe vie for places in the hope of gaining a well-respected degree which unlocks opportunities in life after university. The myths surrounding the interview process are legendary, the pace of the teaching is fast, demanding and rewarding, the co-curricular offering is rich, and some of the traditions are just a little quirky. But, with competition for places more intense than ever and no guarantee of a successful application, it can be an intimidating challenge to take on. So, I would like to talk through an overview of an Oxbridge education in this article and explain why it is perhaps a little more accessible than you might think.
What kind of thinker are you?
Are you naturally curious, question what you learn in lessons and enjoy debating hot topics with your peers and your teachers? Do you live by the Socratic maxim that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living for mankind’? If so, the Oxbridge teaching model might well suit you. The core teaching for each subject is based around conversations, normally between two or three students and their tutor, who is an expert on that topic. These are called tutorials (Oxford) or supervisions (Cambridge), and they offer a chance to talk in-depth about a topic and to receive individual feedback on your work. To prepare for each meeting with their tutor, students will have read the books on the reading list and prepared an essay a week, or sometimes, two. There is also a requirement to attend lectures, seminars and classes on a weekly basis to supplement learning. Terms are shorter than other universities’ and are only 8 weeks long which means that preparatory work for each term is set for the preceding holiday and examined in the week before term officially begins. So, in addition to strong academic ability, you need to have mastered those important study skills of organisation and time management and be motivated to study independently.
How do I know if it’s the right thing for me?
There is no typical Oxbridge student and no single experience. Students who are passionate about their subject, diligent, driven and, most of all, have a love of academic exploration are already embodying many of the qualities necessary to apply and to succeed. It is never too early to embrace academic excellence and WHS has a varied and exciting Academic Scholarship programme to inspire pupils at every Key Stage, including Rosewell and Explore lectures, subject societies and academic extension clubs, WimTalks and Symposia, masterclasses and more informal discussion groups such as the hugely popular Tea and T’inking. In our new STEAM tower, and through our STEAM+ initiative, we have a brilliant new space specifically designed to help ingenuity to flourish and allow creative experimentation in inter-disciplinary learning. The scholarship programme is a warmly inclusive one: a desire to challenge oneself and venture into new areas of interest are the only criteria for involvement. More on our WHS offering across the school can be found in Mr Addis’s blog here https://wakelet.com/wake/amIaQ4T3b_jPHEuEUGf3v
Above: Sixth Formers studying in the Common Room
I’ve decided to apply: now what?
Every student who decides to apply for Oxbridge will have access to individual and group support as part of the Oxbridge preparation programme. The programme is officially launched in the Spring Term of Year 12 and we assign students a mentor in their subject, with whom they will meet regularly to discuss and develop their areas of interest. The best candidates drive their own mentoring sessions, bringing ideas to the table and challenging themselves to think around their subject. Importantly, it should not feel like ‘extra’ work but an opportunity to explore areas that have particularly piqued your interest in lessons. A favourite author, a specific and niche period of History, a passion for Greek tragedy or a love of linguistics: there are no set boundaries and the world of academia really is your metaphorical oyster!
The application process
Oxbridge applications need to be submitted earlier than other universities, and students will need to finalise their Personal Statements in the summer holiday of Year 12, ready to review and send to UCAS before October half term. You will focus also in the Autumn term of Year 13 on preparing for any aptitude test and, if invited for one, your interview.
Urban myths abound about the ‘dreaded’ Oxbridge interview: as I prepared for my own, I was horrified to be told stories of the naïve student who was asked to throw a brick through a (closed) window or the hopeful who, when asked by the interviewing don to ‘surprise me!’, set fire to his interviewer’s newspaper with unfortunate consequences. The reality for me was a very accessible and interesting conversation about Medea and other Euripides plays, which I had nominated in the interview as my specialist subject, a few difficult questions to prompt lateral and dynamic thinking, and absolutely no requests to destroy any element of my tutor’s study.
Interviews can be unnerving: they are, by and large, a new experience in an unfamiliar place but your interviewer is on your side and will not expect you to be a global expert on your A level subject. At interview, the best candidates present their ability, interest and potential, and are encouraged to apply their knowledge to new problems.
You will be expected to engage in an intense academic conversation to allow you show what you know but also to demonstrate that you would flourish in a tutorial-style learning environment. There will be a few unexpected questions; primarily to stop you reciting your carefully learned, heftily rhetorical speech on why Homer is the best poet that the world has ever seen (He is. But your interviewer also knows that). Thinking hard, pausing to collect yourself, being measured, coherent and eloquent in your responses are all components of a good interview which will hopefully be enjoyed by both sides. With regards to preparation, practice is key to help you acclimatise to nerves and think quickly and logically, so do take advantage of any opportunities organized by the school and independently if you can.
Above: Year 12 Science
Fortes fortuna adiuvat
The highly competitive nature of the application process and the extra effort involved proves to be too much of a gamble for some. In addition, on review of the courses available, other students conclude that their dream university course is not to be found at Oxford or Cambridge. However, pupils who are confident, highly academic and have an intrinsic love of learning should certainly seek advice about Oxbridge application from the teacher of their favourite subject or the WHS Sixth Form Team. Whatever the outcome, the experience of an application will be an intellectually enriching and stimulating one, and it could result in three or four years of an unforgettable undergraduate educational experience.
Moreover, in addition to the academic experience, Oxford and Cambridge also both offer a vast range of activities to be enjoyed outside of tutorials, from debating in the Oxford Union to the Cambridge Footlights; from college choirs to becoming a sporting Blue; plus many of the usual student societies. Do contact me or Mrs Nicolas (for STEM subjects) or myself if you would like to find out more.
And one final word of advice about that interview: do have something in your arsenal which does not involve arson itself, on the off-chance that a world expert actually does ask you to ‘surprise them’…
This Friday Gem comes from Priscilla Abeelack who shared this idea with the Geography and Economics department.
The teacher starts by posing a question. At the end the teacher says “Popcorn + student name”
That student then responds fully and then asks another related/development question to take the discussion further. The student says “Popcorn + student name”
Or the student asks another question that is unrelated, for a good bit of interleaving!
And so on…until the whole class has been ‘popcorned’.
The teacher could start with something very ‘small’ and see how ‘wide’ the discussion goes, or vice versa; or the teacher could start on one topic, and see whether students can move to another topic through their questioning.
This would also be relevant for languages and other subjects to consolidate new vocabulary or terminologies. For example, ‘define …’, ‘what is the formula for …?’, ‘Explain one effect of …’, ‘Explain one cause of …’.
Popcorn questions is effective because:
It helps students create networks of ideas, proven to strengthen storage in long-term memory.
It could be useful in revisiting past material (interleaving!).
It requires students to really listen to each other and to respond appropriately.
It encourages a questioning mindset for students, identifying ways to develop and deepen discussion through asking questions.
It puts the responsibility on the students to shape the discussion – they are not reliant on the teachers.
It encourages students to take ownership of their learning and classroom experience.
Teaching and learning Gem #18 – Guest Edited by AFB – the problem with interrupting the pause
Following on from Isabelle’s gems about questioning, and the need to pause…
We have also been discussing what interrupting that pause might actually do.
Why do we interrupt a pause?
We teach in a bubbly, vibrant school. We are not used to silence in the classroom. It’s a bit awkward.
We move around our topics and texts fairly swiftly, and are not always comfortable with slowing down.
We want to help. If we feel awkward, how awkward must THEY feel? I know, we’ll turn the question around! Changing the word order will not only help them understand the question better, but it will break the awkward feeling!!
INCORRECT!
Jumping in, to ‘help’ a student, or to break a silence might relieve someone, sometime. But it is also likely to:
confuse
or disorientate the thoughts about the first question
or embarrass by drawing attention to the pause
or even patronise by perceiving a problem where there isn’t one
Mrs Wei Fang, teacher of Mandarin at WHS, reflects on her own experience of questioning in the classroom, before reviewing a blog post by Kris Boulton ‘Should we use questions to teach?’
“…the question is not why questions are better, it is when.”
As a language teacher, I have been thinking a lot about questioning in the classroom, getting students to really think about the grammar and vocabulary they learnt, in order to improve their understanding and memorising. For example, ‘how’ questions are particularly useful in assisting students to remember Chinese characters, or hanzi: ‘How do you know the meaning of this character?’ Students would answer: It means juice 汁 because it has water radical氵 (the components of characters that indicate meaning). I then would retrieve other learning from their long-term memory by asking an elaboration question: ‘Where else can you see this radical?’. Giving students the thinking time, asking them to connect their learning and expecting a better answer are very important strategies of questioning.
However, questions do not always go well. At times I asked a series of questions and felt like my questions were much longer than the students’ answer. They seemed to be confused about why I asked those questions. I then reflected on my lesson and realised that: why didn’t I just explain it?
So, it is time to think about why we ask questions. Kristopher Boulton argues that questions are not necessarily better than explanations, though sometimes he switches to questions when he feels the need to promote understanding. In his blog post ‘Should we use questions to teach? -1&2”, he addresses that the question is not why questions are better, it is when. He concluded that: ‘questions can be very effective tools of teaching, but they must be used with incredible care.’ A very structured grid of various question types concluded by him and another blogger can be found here:
Question Spectrum
The above matrix is made for Maths, but one can be also useful for other subjects. It brought to my attention the pointlessness of allowing students to guess without establishing their prior knowledge. In Mandarin, there is language content that is better to be explicitly taught first, especially the content that doesn’t exist in English, for example: tones, measure words, characters (not randomly drawing it but with certain orders), as well as unique culture conception such as Hukou (a system of household registration used in China), etc. In order to enhance understanding, I once asked year 7 students to analyse the tones, by asking them the differences between Chinese and English sounds. As a result of lacking enough input of Chinese, some students were struggling to tell the differences among the four tones. They told me that the rising and turning tones sound the same. In this case, further questions on this will confuse them. It made all the difference the next time when I made them practice tones for enough time, and then asked them to tell me which tones they have heard and why (verbalizing burgeoning understanding). A key quotation from Boulton that I keep in mind for my subject is ‘never ask pupils questions to which they have not already been told the answer, unless they know enough that answering the question requires them only inching forwards.’
addresses that the question is not why questions are better, it is when. He concluded that: ‘questions can be very effective tools of teaching, but they must be used with incredible care.’ A very structured grid of various question types concluded by him and another blogger can be found here: