Thinking Out Loud: Inquisitive Classrooms

I spoke to the Curriculum Leaders (or HoDs) at our school last week about the importance of students asking questions. Recently I have been doing lots of observations, all around school, and I have noticed that our teachers are really great at asking questions of our students but there is an absence of students asking the questions back. I started to wonder; is this just our school? Is it every subject? Am I expecting too much of students? Have I inflated the interaction we should expect of our students?

Then this week an article popped into my inbox via Linkedin. Kate Jones at the inspiring Evidence Based Education wrote about the power of statements to promote student discussion. She is explicit that this isn't instead of or replacing questioning but to complement the embedded practice we already have.

Questioning is an effective strategy to encourage and illuminate student thinking, but it does not necessarily need to take the form of a question. Statements can also be effective to promote elaboration and connected, flexible thinking in a classroom (Coe et al., 2020).

She discussed the work of Wiliam and Leahy (2016) in developing our understanding of formative assessment technique and explains;

Wiliam and Leahy also explain a key benefit of using statements in the classroom, “Asking questions tends to close down discussion, because students usually just answer the question. More importantly, when you are asked a question, you can be wrong. You cannot be wrong responding to a statement.”

This was like a lightbulb for me - does this mean that we are so good at questioning that we are actually closing down discussion? Have we got so good at posing, pouncing and bouncing? So good at pausing for thinking time and cold calling that we have… squashed our students’ independence of thought?

When I posed this question to the Curriculum Leaders I confessed that it was my classroom too that was noticeably quiet of inquisition - what could I change about my own practice? I started by reflecting on my upcoming lessons - where in my slides/demonstrations was there space for students to ask questions? I changed a few so that where they had read with my questions leading the slide, I wrote ‘What questions do you have?’ alongside an image or new information. I found my students had really limited questions… my new question (and quasi experiment) is; are they so unused to asking questions they don’t have any or am I presenting information that they don’t want/need to ask questions about or am I asking them in the wrong way? 

Kate Jones’ article has made me think anew about the place of statements in my classroom. Could this also present a new way to get my students thinking and asking me? Could this help increase the inquisitiveness in my classroom?

As I explore this in more depth, I will let you know. In the meantime, I greatly encourage you to read the article. She gives really useful examples to help you imagine how you can experiment with, or embed this practice into your classroom.

https://evidencebased.education/statements-as-an-alternative-to-questioning/#:~:text=Using%20statements%20in%20the%20classroom,for%20discussion%20and%20peer%20collaboration.