More on asking open-ended questions

July 11th

Ch. 5 deals with open ended questions. Norris points out the 4 most popular questions teachers use in the classroom.

·         Closed questions that require yes and no answers

·         Recall questions-test students memories, an example is “What was the date of the Battle of New Orleans?"

·         Informational questions-questions that are used to gain information, “What is your name?”

·         Open ended questions-These are the questions teachers want to make sure they use in the classroom. Norris states that open ended questions require using deeper thinking skills.

Here is an example of 2 different ways to phrase a question:

·         “Name 2 books on leadership for the new millennium?”

·         “What do you believe any new book on leadership- to be relevant in our world now-needs to address?” (p. 38)

·         Which question is more effective in teaching students to think deeper? You guessed it the second one.

Here are a few examples of her greatest hit question starters....

“What questions do you have?”

“Tell me more about????”

“What do you think of????”

“What information do you need to make this clearer???”

Tomorrow I pledge to create a good open ended question to prompt my students to think deeper about sentence types!. Although I like this book, I have to think long and hard to apply this type of questioning to teaching English.  Perhaps I will use

  “What information do you need to make this clearer???” I love that question.

Last bit of worthy advice in Ch. 5 –wait time. This author recommends counting to five.