Posing Questions for Class Discussion
The key feature of any modern teaching approach is to ask questions. To be sure, a pointed suggestion of asking some questions during a lecture might seem a tad silly. However, the number of professors who actually pose non-rhetorical questions during their lecture is astonishingly small. An even smaller portion of professors actually pause and wait long enough for students to answer!
Probably the biggest mistake that professors make when posing questions to the class is to pose cognitively low-level questions that are too easily answered by the students relying on preexisting declarative knowledge. Classrooms of students responding quickly, and in unison, is often mistaken for meaningful dialogue. This is widely known as choral-response. If all the students in the class can recite and answer without thinking about it, it’s probably a waste of valuable class time.If you’re surprised that professions unintentionally tend toward asking easier rather than harder questions, consider the considerable attractive strength of the siren’s song of easy questions. Posing easier questions more often results in students’ rapidly responding, thus avoiding awkward silence in the classroom. Posing easier questions more often results in students giving correct answers rather than incorrect answers, thus avoiding embarrassment on all parties. Posing easier questions are quick to design, thus making class preparation time more efficient. And, posing easier questions usually don’t require long duration answers, thus allowing the professor to more quickly get back to the business of lecturing.
Example Hierarchy of Low-Level to High-Level Questions
(from the field of astronomy)
LOW LEVEL – SUPERFICIAL
- What is a planet?
- How many planets are there around our Sun?
- Why is Mars considered an inner planet?
- Should this newly discovered object be designated as a planet?
HIGH LEVEL – COMPLEX & NUANCED
Taken together, it’s no wonder that professors are inclined to only ask easier questions. Alas, easier questions do not support a professor intent on helping his students to love learning big ideas in your course because the beauty is in beginning to understand our world’s complexity. The consensus recommendation here is that the best posed questions should be hard enough that students need to create an idea in order to answer them, but not so difficult as to discourage students. This is definitely a fine line to walk along! The most useful questions carefully crafted to lead the students to deeper levels of understanding or to illustrate the fruitful power of ideas.
Another attractive distraction that can pull you off track from creating student discussion in class besides too easy questions are “useless questions.” Questions should drive an energetic conversation between the professor and students and questions such as “does everyone understand?” and “do you have any questions?” do not provide the professor with any desired insight into whether or not the students actually comprehend the ideas being presented. If a professor pauses and says, “everyone with me?” students naturally respond by silently nodding their heads, whether or not they understand. This common practice is so ingrained we might not even notice when we are doing it. Questions need to be purposeful. Know what I mean?
The second challenge to effectively posing question in the classroom is providing sufficient wait time. When posed a question, students need the professor to stop and wait. This wait time provides students with a moment to consider the question, consider a plausible answer, consider alternatives, then decide they have sufficient confidence to respond. This cognitively complex process takes time—a lot more time than professors think it should (because experts already know what the answer is). It takes even longer if the class contains students who are not native English speakers. Studies have shown that if a professor can wait at least ten seconds—which often seems like an eternity when standing alone in the front of a class—then many more students will provide responses and responses will be more varied and nuanced. This is exactly what stimulates intellectually engaged conversation and drives students to become more motivated learners.
Expert professors find pragmatic ways to stop and provide students with needed thinking-time before soliciting answers to posed questions. One particularly useful strategy to help fidgety lecturers be certain that a full ten seconds elapses before accepting a range of audience responses is to fill the time by turning away from the class, taking a sip of coffee, or flipping through lecture notes without looking at the students. The time can be increased by asking responders to explain the reasoning behind their answers and not revealing if the offered response is correct before accepting several other plausible answers for comparison. In much the same way discussion and think-time can be extended by posing the follow-up question, “if someone were to get this question incorrect on a test, what is it they would most likely be misunderstanding?”
As a starting place to find questions worth posing to students, consider the end-of-chapter questions from your carefully selected textbook. Although they might not be perfect, such questions can be adapted readily to encourage student contemplation. Another approach is to have an object, simulation, or a demonstration available to create questions around. Lecturing about science and technology has a distinct advantage over other disciplines in that demonstrations, whether physical or computer-based, can be provocative, provide illustrative clarification, and, most importantly, excite the learner through direct experiences with unexpected phenomena. That means that doing demonstrations and bringing real examples to class should be a great teaching idea.
However, the research on the actual effectiveness of teaching demonstrations is clear. Just showing students a demonstration is no more effective than not doing a demonstration at all. The most important part of the demonstration is asking students to predict what they will see—predictions committed to in writing—and for students to predict what will happen when particular variables are changed. It is the act of predicting and rationalizing these predictions where most of the learning occurs from demonstrations and simulations. So, stop, and take the time to ask “what do you think you’ll see?”and then compare it afterwards to “did that match your prediction?”
Tim Slater, University of Wyoming, Tim@CAPERteam.com
Suggested citation: Slater, T. F. (2019, May). Posing questions for class discussion. Society of College Science Teachers Blog, 4(10), https://www.scst.org/blog