Questions in the Classroom

My last post was about Concept Check Questions, a particular type of question that we might ask in the classroom to determine how well our students understand a concept.

In this post, I’ll take a broader look at questions in the classroom. Are you ready?

First of all, I want to divide questions into two types: Genuine Questions and Display Questions. 

Display Questions

These are questions we ask our students when we already know the answer and are expecting to receive that answer from the students. If the students give the “correct” answer, then we know that they understand.

For examples of Display Questions, check out my previous post on Concept Check Questions. 

Note, there can be more than one correct answer to a Display Question, and they can be contextual, but the scope is not unlimited. For example, if I ask a student in a lesson about days of the week, “What day is it today?” The answer will depend on when I ask the question; similarly, if I ask a student in a lesson about family, “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” then the answer will depend on which student I ask. The reason that I ask these questions is to gauge my students’ levels of understanding.

If you are an educator, the Display Question is an incredibly important tool. It allows us to get a very quick yet rather precise assessment of what our students understand or don’t understand. 

If you’re not an educator, then the Display Question might be familiar to you as a parent or even a leader or mentor to others. You might also see these in a public interview, when the interviewer has been primed, such as on Late Night shows or News Segments. For example, if an news anchor asks a politician, “What policies do you suggest to respond to this problem?”, it is likely that the anchor has already been given the answers beforehand, and that the politician only came on the show in the first place to answer that question as a way of raising awareness. Alternatively, a more combative interviewer might ask a display question with the specific intent of revealing the interviewee’s ignorance, such as we see in this video:

Avoid the GWIT Question

There is one thing we have to be cautious to avoid when asking Display Questions. Guess What I’m Thinking Questions (GWIT Qs) are Display Questions where the teacher has an answer in mind, but it is not obvious to the students what the teacher is looking for. I’ll demonstrate this with an example from a lesson I observed recently. 

In a Maths lesson, the teacher taught her students how to multiply by two-digit numbers following a lesson on multiplication by single-digit numbers. After teaching the technique, she asked the question, “What is the difference between multiplying by a one-digit number and multiplying by a two-digit number?”

Though the students had demonstrably understood the lesson so far and had applied the technique to a number of exercises, they were confused by this question and fell silent. Indeed, I could not think what the answer was. Of course, one obvious difference is that “one is multiplying by a single digit and the other is multiplying by two digits”, but a students offered that answer and the teacher rejected it. Eventually, the teacher answered the question herself, “When multiplying by single-digit numbers we get the answer directly, but when multiplying by two-digit numbers we have to add the results first”. As much as the students had already demonstrated their understanding of this concept, it might well have taken hours for one of them to give precisely that answer.

A more direct question might have been, “What do we have to do when we multiply by two-digit numbers that we don’t have to do when we multiply by single-digit numbers?” Here, the question focuses in on one element but still requires the students to understand and formulate the answer, and there is essentially only one possible correct answer to the question.

Genuine Questions

A Genuine Question is any question we don’t know the answer to. 

Outside of the classroom and the other contexts I have mentioned above, Genuine Questions far outnumber Display Questions. We ask these questions to find out information. In general, people simply don’t ask questions they already know the answer to if it’s not part of a teaching strategy or debate technique.

Examples of Genuine Questions are asking, “What day is it today?” because you’re checking the timetable while waiting for a bus; or asking, “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” because you’re developing a personal relationship with someone.

One of the tragedies that I observe in classrooms is that many teachers treat almost all questions as Display Questions and ask very few Genuine Questions at all. One of my goals with this post as well as in some of the training I do is to encourage teachers to ask more Genuine Questions.

Genuine Questions in the Classroom

Sadly, for many teachers it seems that the Genuine Question does not have a role in the classroom. This is something I strongly disagree with, and I hope that some of you reading this will try using more Genuine Questions in your classrooms. There are two main reasons why we should use Genuine Questions in the classroom, which I will describe below.

Relationship Building

Genuine Questions are the catalyst to most relationships. We ask questions to find out about people we are interested in. We ask them personal questions, and they share personal information. Through this process, relationships deepen.

It is sad to note that many teachers do not develop any kind of relationship with their students. Many teachers see the traditional Authority Relationship as essential. As such, all of their interactions with students are impersonal. They do not get to know anything about their students and vice versa.

These teachers might sometimes ask questions that appear Genuine, such as “What do you want to be when you grow up?” but are often then revealed as Display questions by the teacher’s response. Here is an example dialogue:

T: 	What do you want to be when you grow up?

S1: I want to be a pilot.

T: 	Good. And what do you want to be when you grow up?

S2:	A doctor.

T:	Please say the full sentence, “I want to be a doctor”. 

S2:	I want to be a doctor.

T:	Good. And what do you want to be when you grow up?

S3:	I want to be a pilot.

T:	Somebody has already said that. Give a different answer.

S3:	I want to be a teacher.

T:	Good.

In this example, which may seem extreme but I assure you is not, we can see that what could have been a Genuine Question was in fact used as a Display Question, and in fact the teacher even undermined the students’ attempts at self expression.

In Indonesia, many teachers start their lessons with formulaic, formal “greetings”, where the teacher greets the students, “Good morning” and the students then stand together and greet the teacher in chorus, “Good morning, Sir. Good morning everybody. How are you? I’m fine thank you” or something along those lines. I have many problems with this practice, but the purposes of this post, I’m interested in questions. It would be far preferable to see the teacher greet the students with a Genuine Question and allow the students to respond and ask each other Genuine Questions, rather than this rote performance.

During my time teaching in schools here, I replaced this performance with a genuine greeting, where I would ask my students about their days, their weekends, etc. and then an instruction for students to each greet the person next to them, at which point they would have a genuine conversation, albeit brief, using genuine questions.

Opinion Forming

The other reason we might ask Genuine Questions in the classroom is to give the students the chance to express their own opinions. 

It is another disappointing reality that students are rarely asked to have opinions. Many teachers are concerned only with giving students and testing for /the correct answer/ and don’t have time for opinions. However, forming opinions is a skill that needs to be refined if we are to do it effectively. If students are never asked to have an opinion, they are not likely to become good at forming opinions.

As such, we should ask our students Genuine Questions about their opinions. Questions like those below:

“Why did you…?” 

“How do you feel about…?”

“Which do you prefer…?”

“What do you think about…?”

“How can we…?”

Here, we are asking questions to which the students might have very varied and perhaps original answers. But as well as the answers, we are also interested in the process by which they arrived at those answers. We might follow up with questions like, “Why do you think that?” and “How did you come to that decision?”

On top of the value of developing important critical thinking skills, this also gives our students a voice and allows them to feel valued and listened to in an environment where students often feel like they are insignificant and have no voice.

Do you understand?

Two examples of questions that should be Genuine but are far too often treated as Display are the question, “Do you understand?” and its cousin, “Are there any questions?”

It should be the case that if a teacher asks either of these questions, it is because she does not know how well her students have understood something and she wants to find out. However, in the majority of cases, either it is assumed that the answer should be “Yes” or else the teacher doesn’t even give the students a real chance to respond. 

If a teacher asks students, “Do you understand?” it should be a Genuine Question based on the fact that she does not know and wants to find out from the students whether they need any further help or not.

I will write about this problem in more detail in my next article, but in short, it is best to avoid this question altogether and replace it with Concept Check Questions, which require the students to actually demonstrate their understanding and thus give a much more valid response.

Overview

• Hopefully you can now identify a question as either Genuine or Display and have a better idea of how to form effective questions of either type.
• Hopefully, you will be able to ask Display Questions that facilitate your students to demonstrate their understanding and avoid Guess What I’m Thinking Questions.
• Hopefully, you will incorporate more Genuine Questions into your lessons to develop a stronger rapport with your students, to help them improve their ability to form and express opinions and to give them a genuine voice.
• And hopefully, you’ll avoid the question, “Do you understand?” And replace it with some more valuable Concept Check Questions or demonstrations. More on this in the next post.

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Bonus: Signal Questions

There is one other type of question that I am aware of, but I don’t know of an official term for these. I’ll refer to them as Signal Questions of which I categorise two types: Positive Signal Questions and Negative Signal Question.

Negative Signal Questions are question we don’t know the answer to, but we are in fact not interested in the answer.

Examples might be asking, “How are you?” not because you really care but because it is polite to do so; or maybe asking “How can we solve this problem?” to show others that you care about the problem, when in fact you have no real intention of doing anything.

Positive Signal Questions are actually a type of Display Question, in the sense that the questioner does already know the answers, but in this case, he is asking the question only to open up an opportunity to demonstrate his own superior knowledge.

An example might be asking, “Do you know why that happened?” and then following up with something like, “Oh, you don’t know? Well, actually it’s because…” 

Such a question strategy could be used for teaching purposes as a way of first gauging the learner’s understanding and then giving information to increase the learner’s understanding. The difference between an effective Display Question and the Positive Signal Question is intention: with the Signal Question, the questioner is not interested in helping the other person learn; he is only interested in showing the other person that he knows more than she does.

Needless to say, these questions do not suggest a good attitude. As such you should avoid using them yourself, and you might also want to avoid others who use them too frequently!