Five or six hands shoot in the air whenever I ask a question with an expected answer. I usually give it a bit of time and soon there are more hands in the air. The students have the information I want, either from their own funds of knowledge or because I’ve given it to them.
When I ask questions that require thinking or an opinion, two or three hands shoot up. These people usually are just saying the first thing that pops into the air. The others are more perplexed. Sometimes I don’t know how long to wait and begin to give some answers myself or call on the automatic responders. Other times I ask the students to stand when they have a guess/answer/idea. Then I have them talk with a shoulder partner about their idea. Finally, I’ll take their answers. Of course the second option involves more learning and is the obviously better choice.
However, timing is an area I am working to improve. This means that for the sake of time I just fill in the blanks instead of allowing the students the they need to formulate their answers. Being aware of this allows me let go of “things” we are supposed to get to and let the students think. I often use follow up questions, rephrase, or change key words to help the students think about the topic in a deeper way. Basically, I’m learning how to give more time and support to get the students to extend their thinking about a topic – not just feeding them the answers to get through the material.
This topic also made me think about how student questions often move the class discussion deeper into a topic. I had a student ask “What’s wrong with regular sentences? Why don’t you want us to use them?” during a Language Arts lesson. I responded “There’s nothing wrong with regular sentences. We’re learning these sentence openers and dress-ups to make our writing interesting and engaging to read. We’re practicing these to build our writing muscles. By the end of this unit we’re all going to have huge writing muscles. These skills will help you all through high school and university.” I realized I didn’t explain why we were doing these activities. If the students didn’t even know the reasons behind the lessons why would they buy into it. I believe common goals are important to commitment to learning, otherwise it’s just busy work.
The two main points you have made are really strong. Giving students the opportunity to talk and explore a question with a partner before responding to you is a valuable thing to do. They often extend each other’s thinking and set the stage for going deeper.
When opening a lesson, it is also important for students to be aware of the goal of the lesson and what they are working toward learning. This helps to give it relevance and focus their attention on the learning.