Creating Whole Class Dicussions
My biggest take away with this reading was the importance of questions and silence. Asking questions impacts the way our lessons can go and can be very good indicators of where we want to take the class. Asking the right questions is very important as it engages our students in higher levels of thinking and can helps us build on what our students already know (scaffolding). I find that too many of the questions on worksheets teachers give to their students to be quite closed-ended with next to no room for interpretation. Of course, there is a need for those type questions in the younger years of high school so that students will be able to identify quickly the main elements presented in a text – plot, theme, character, etc. Asking questions in class helps teachers to model the appropriate type of academic language that is needed to be used in the classroom.
Of course, the one question that teachers dread asking would have to be, “Does anyone have any questions?” More often than not, teachers will ask the question and leave very little room (usually one second) for response from their students. At the same time, teachers fear the dreaded “I don’t get it” response from their students. Sometimes we just need to have uncomfortable silences in the classroom to foster healthy discussion. As teachers we need to be open to receiving that type of feedback from our students for the betterment of ourselves and for the betterment of our lesson plans. More so, as inquiring teachers, we need to constantly question what we do/how we do/why we do in the classroom and figure out what worked and what didn’t and how could this have been done differently and how do you get better engagement from your students.