What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher??

Blog Post #4:

My reaction to this particular blog post was major confusion. I did not understand what point of view to have. After reading the post by Ben Johnson, The Right way to ask questions in the classroom ,I finally understood what i was supposed to focus on. He was very straight forward with everything and i respect that. The author says that we, as teachers, need to understand that we do not know everything. Teachers often ask the question "Does everybody understand?" This is like telling the kids that they have one last chance to ask questions; if they do not ask questions then they understand completely and the teacher is free to move on to the next subject. Asking this question is not the way to teach at all because if the students don't understand what your teaching, then how are they supposed to ask questions about it? A more effective approach towards asking questions to the students would be to ask a question such as, "What do we call it when an insect kills itself?" pause for at least three seconds and say a students name, "Sally." With this approach, all of the students will automatically be thinking about an answer and only after another child is chosen, they will sigh in relief because their name was not chosen. (Ben Johnson, "The right way to ask questions in the classroom.") After reading and understanding this, i completely agree with the EDM310 class motto "Questions are more important than answers!"

Dr. Chesley, in Asking Better Questions in the Classroom, makes a very good point about Open Ended questions and Closed ended questions. I don't necessarily like the example she has chose to describe these types of questions, but it gets the point across. She says that a Closed ended question structures the response for the student, and it can be answered by one word such as yes, no, or a brief phrase. On the other hand, Open ended questions leaves the form of the answer up to the person who is responding; thereby, eliciting more thinking and yielding more information. For example, if you ask "If Mrs. Rosa Parks had given up her seat to a white man on the bus in 1955, do you think the history of civil rights in this country would have been different?" The answer to this question is most likely going to be a yes or no, which is a closed ended question because that's the way you framed that question. If you ask "What if Mrs. Rosa Parks had given her seat to a white man on the bus in 1955, what do you believe the consequences of the implications would have been for our country?" This is an example of an Open ended question, the answer will have to be more complex.(Dr Chesley, Asking Better Questions in the Classroom). With the understanding of this video, her point was that the way the teacher asks the question, depends solely on the type of answer the teacher gets. I will keep this in mind whenever i become a teacher.