Blog Post #6

Asking Better Questions in the Classroom

When asking a question, you never think of what kind of question you are asking, whether it's open-ended questions, or close-ended questions. These are things we should think more about when asking questions in the classroom. After watching Joanne Chesley's she explains more about the open and closed ended questions. Open-ended questions are more than a yes/no answer, it requires the student to dig deeper and give an explanation. A close-ended question is a question where the answer is as simple as yes, no, maybe, true, or false. In the video, Chesley stated a question, and the way she states it, made it a close-ended question. She then reworded it, and it became an open-ended question and made the students really think about what they were being asked and made them dig deeper than a simple answer. I also read Maryellen Weimer's article which explains ways we can improve the ways we write out questions. Her first idea was to prepare questions. When making your lesson plans, plan out some quality questions throughout the lesson so your students can really think and keep their attention. Her second idea was to play with the questions. What she means by playing with the questions is asking your students question before you begin, so they can fully engage themselves. Her final idea is preserve the good questions. When a student comes up with a good question, write the question down so you can keep it for future reference. Both of these taught me so much about questions that I have never thought about before.
What Questions Will I Use In My Classroom

In my future classroom I hope to use more open-ended questions to keep the students intrigued in what I am teaching. I think that this is a very important way for the student to learn more and remember it. I have had many teachers throughout school give us true/false questions that I never remember what they are after the test because as many students do, I memorize them by a word in the sentence and that is burp-back education, what we are trying to end. It is also good to get your brain really thinking and using critical thinking. I would have never thought that the wording of the question would change the answer. After this assignment, I feel confident that I could incorporate this in my classroom.