Interrogative Words: Stimulating Discourse
One of the most frequent refrains I hear from instructors is how asking the "right" questions to guide students' learning is hard. I love how this resource breaks down the types of questions we can ask and helps us build intentional questioning approaches, independent of content.
One way to make conversations more equitable is to pay attention to wait time. This is the amount of time between when a teacher poses a question, and when the teacher either calls on a student, rephrases the question, gives a hint, or answers the question himself or herself—it is essentially the amount of time the teacher gives the students to think. Research has shown that the wait time teachers give students is remarkably short. Believe it or not, the average wait time for most teachers is approximately one second. This is because teachers are almost immediately uncomfortable with silence in a classroom conversation, and seek to fill the void with a student’s voice, or their own.