WARNING: Is The Quality Of Questioning In Your Classrooms Harming Your Pupils’ Progress?

WARNING: Is The Quality Of Questioning In Your Classrooms Harming Your Pupils’ Progress?

Find out how to increase pupil progress with powerful questions that open up their thinking.

I’m going to let you into a secret.

When I was a teacher, just like most of our trainees, I thought my questioning skills were amazing, because it was something that was always highlighted as a strength in lesson observations.

Actually they were rubbish!

So my coaching training taught me that I’d been asking lots of closed questions, which could be answered with a lazy “yes” or “no”.

The problem is that closed questions often shut down deep thinking and they’ll kill creativity as well.

By opening up your questions, you’ll get much deeper, much richer answers, and you’ll also get better engagement.

A simple, easy way to do this is by starting your questions with “WHAT” or “HOW”. So for example, replace. “Do you understand?” or “Have you got any questions?”, with “What else do I need to explain?” Instead of, “Are you okay?”, ask “How are you?” Instead of “Do you like this?”, ask “What do you think of this?”

So when you want to empower others, stretch their thinking and promote creativity, and engage them more, simply open up your questions with “what” or “how”.

So I hope you found that useful.

Learn more at training.coachinginschools.com

– I’m Annie Boate, CEO at Coachinginschools. If you’ve got any questions, please get in touch.