Just Questions

The process that teachers use to question students happens in classrooms every day but the way questioning is done can have a huge effect on the correct determination of student understanding of the current topic of study. Good application of questioning style and type in the hands of an effective educator can demonstrate student knowledge to the teacher that can help them determine when and how to proceed as well as when additional intervention may be necessary. Effective questions, whether written or oral, can supply formative student learning data that will become much more than just questions.Good questions should be…

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We Don’t Fix Teachers

How many times do we say to ourselves or our colleagues, "I'll fix that"? When something is not going the way we want, the desire is to "fix" it. Sometimes we allow the "fix it" mentality to begin to apply to ourselves or co-workers. We start to think that it is the teacher that needs fixing. The truth is that we don't need to fix teachers because they are not broken! In fact, nothing is "broken". It only needs adjusting and refining.When faced with new ways of doing things as educators, we often feel that if we are changing what…

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The Way We Think

I'll start by saying to everyone who doesn't teach math, please don't stop reading at the next sentence! I'm going to use some simple math examples to illustrate this article but I believe the thought processes apply to all areas. In order for us to teach the thinking skills that are necessary for solving math problems or understanding any concept in any area of study, we must first discover how we think and learn. Specifically, how do we gain real understanding, as opposed to memorizing a "trick" or set of steps long enough to pass a test with no ability…

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Questioning…What We Do

We talk at length about student learning, what we want students to learn, how we will approach delivering instruction and how we will know whether students have learned, but in the end it all comes back to whether students have acquired the knowledge and skills that we intended. How do we know and how do we get them there? I believe the answer lies in effective questioning. There are multiple ways to deliver instruction, but the key to all of them is using questioning techniques that guide students' thinking in the direction we intend and ultimately show us the students'…

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Are We Clear On That?

One very important piece of an effective classroom is teacher clarity. John Hattie's research in The Applicability of Visible Learning to Higher Education [Hattie 2015] assigns teacher clarity an effect size of .75 which is well above the threshold of .40 which represents one year's growth for one year's effort. This effect size makes it clear that teacher clarity is very important as we consider strategies for reaching our students, but what is teacher clarity? How do we make sure we have "clarity" in our classrooms?Teacher clarity is a simple concept to understand but can be more complex to actually implement. Clarity…

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Practical Application of Guiding Questions

We have divided our course into units and have created guiding questions after carefully unpacking standards that our students need to know. We have collaborated with our colleagues to refine our guiding questions and have posted them for our students to see. Now what do we do with them? Guiding questions not only drive excellent instruction but assist in lesson planning as well as student assessment. Guiding questions are central to daily, focused instruction and evaluation.I am often surprised when I see a guiding question posted in a classroom, especially in a subject with unfamiliar content, and when I ask…

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