Blog Post #4

After reading the postThe Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom I took a step back and realized that I am one of those students who sits back and lets someone else answer the questions, just because I know they will. I know the feeling of being one of the "not so smart" students. I like the point the author made that we as teachers get up in front of students and pretend as if we know everything, when we are the one asking all the questions. The question Ben Johnson asked at the beginning of the post was " What does a teacher asking questions of a class expect the class to learn from the questioning process?." What he means is what do we as teachers asking students who already don't know much about the subject expect the students to get from us just asking does everyone understand. This question is a question that many teachers ask all day everyday. What exactly do we want our students to understand, instead of just being so simple and asking if they do understand, we as teachers should know what it is we want them to get. I got some creative ideas to do in my future classroom from this post. Instead of asking the question to the entire class, pause to give students time to start thinking then randomly call a student to answer it. Even though some students may be happy you didn't call on them, at least they participated in the thinking process of the question
This post not only made me open my eyes, to become a better teacher, but to also become a better student. How can I expect my students to want to ask questions and want to learn, if I as a student right now can't do the same. One thing I have taken from the post Three Ways to Ask Better Questions in the Classroom is that instead of letting a question be as simple as do you understand?, instead prepare the questions you want to ask our students, this will help them know and learn the important things to take from that lesson. I like the idea of playing with a questions, instead of letting your students know right off hand that they are right, make them think more about the question. This process allows every student even the ones who don't like to participate the opportunity to maybe want to join in on the class discussion. Being able to ask the type of questions to get our students involved should be a very big goal as a teacher. No teacher wants a boring class who only answers yes and no to the questions, but we as educators cannot blame the kids, we too must take responsibility.
In the video Asking Better Questions in the Classroom Part 1 Joanne Chesley teaches us that we need to be more open ended with our questions, what is an open ended questions, a question that needs more than a yes or no answer. If we ask more of these questions students will learn more, and think harder about the answer needed for the question. The first thing I took for the video Question Style and Strategies was to ask questions that students want to answer, he started off by asking the students how they envisioned what they say as they read the book. These students got the chance to use their imagination, all while doing classwork. Afterwards the students got to compare with their classmates their answers, which what better way to learn than to get students involved with one another.
In all we as future educators have to do better when trying to ensure that our students know and understand what we need them to know. Instead of using closed ended questions, and not involving every student we have to be just as open as we would want them to be.