RSOM Faculty Development Guide: Start a Teaching Renaissance

Asking questions throughout a small group session is a great teaching strategy.

Why Ask Questions

• To check for student understanding of material.
• To engage with students, and promote participation.
• To review and emphasize important points.
• To help students retain material.

Good questions have certain characteristics.

Characteristics of Effective Questions

• Relevant - Questions should align with your learning objectives and focus on the content that was covered in the session, in a previous lecture, or through course materials.
• Clear and Concise -  Effective questions are not vague.  Even if students don’t know the answer they should still understand what is wanted from the question.  Effective questions are also concise meaning they do not contain any extraneous information. 
• Single Dimensional - A good question focuses on one idea.  If you want students to examine more than one thing then break your question into multiple questions.
• Challenging, but appropriate to student knowledge and level - You want to challenge students’ thinking but not to the point where a majority of the class cannot answer the question and becomes frustrated and confused.
• Seek higher cognitive effort - Good questions have students apply, analyze, evaluate, or create.      

Open-Ended Questions vs. Close-Ended Questions

Questioning is a crucial part of small group learning, however if a facilitator doesn’t use effective strategies then they will not promote engagement and encourage students to use critical thinking.  Four strategies that you should use when questioning students are pose, pause, pounce, probe.

• Pose - In this first step you simply ask your question to the whole group.
• Pause - In the second step you give students time to think about the answer and what they want to say.  Giving enough wait time is critical.  If you simply ask a question and then immediately ask for volunteers or call on people then students will not have time to formulate a good answer and it will cause anxiety.  You should waiti 60 seconds after asking a question to call on students.  
• Pounce - What happens when a facilitator asks for volunteers is that the same students tend to participate.  To mitigate that tell students you will call on them and try to rotate so that you can call on everyone at least once.  If a student does not know the answer then you should guide them to come up with the answer and if that doesn’t  help you can call on someone else to answer.
• Probe - Once you receive an answer from a student don’t immediately tell them if it’s correct or not.  Instead ask them why they answered that way.  You can also ask other students if they answered similarly or differently.  You don't have to take too much time doing this however it is good to probe a little bit especially if the student answered incorrectly.  Probing will let you see the student’s thought process and allow them to consider their answer a bit more and possibly correct themselves before you do.

One of the biggest fears instructors have when facilitating is that they will ask a question and no hands will go up.  You will already mitigate this by calling on students.  However, even if you call on a student they might not know the answer.  Here are some strategies to use when that happens.

When Students Don't Respond to Questions

• Redirect - If a student does not know the answer you can call on another student to answer the question.  This is also a useful strategy if a student answers incorrectly.
• Rephrase - There are three ways you can rephrase when questioning.
  • Reword Question - You can reword the question to make it clearer.  For example – You ask “What is neurosis?” and the student doesn’t respond.  You can ask “What are the identifying characteristics of a neurotic person?”
  • Provide Information - You can provide information to help students come up with an answer.  For example you ask “How far has the ball fallen after 3 seconds?” Student answers “I have no idea.” You can explain how to measure distance and then ask the question again.  
  • Break Question Down - You can break the question down into more manageable parts.  For example you ask a student “What is the epidemiology of Polio.”  Student answers “I don’t know.” You can say “Let’s break down the question.  First what does epidemiology mean?”  
• Remember to Use Wait Time - If you don’t give students a chance to formulate their answers then they will not be ready to answer when called on.