Katie Bannon, a 3rd Grade teacher, brings up an important point when building up our students’ self-confidence. She says that teachers should stop saying “no” to students when they get an incorrect answer. Saying phrases such as, “No, you’re wrong” would make a student feel like their ideas are not valued, which would lower their self-confidence. Instead, she suggests that if a student is not getting something right the first time, that you still validate their ideas but that you push them to take their thinking further. Katie stays away from asking yes or no questions and one word answers, in order to help build her students’ thinking. I believe that this is good practice as teachers to stay away from asking these questions – something that I am still working on myself!
Valuing our students ideas and their contributions – even if they are not hitting the mark – is still essential, because we want our students to feel like they are valued and that sharing their ideas is important. If we value our students and their contributions and progress that they are making, just imagine the amount of self-confidence that will be fostered for the student.
Reference:
Bannon, K. (n.d). Saying no to no. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/building-student-confidence
Staying away from yes/no and other closed ended questions can definitely support students critical thinking and encourage them sharing and, thus, developing their ideas. I am curious, what kinds of responses might the teacher give if a student does provide a ‘wrong’ answer to a more closed ended question?
What I would do in that case would be to rephrase the question or give the student a clue that could help them arrive at a better answer. For example, a couple weeks ago I was working with a student on filling in the blanks in a number sequence (i.e 5, __, 3). The student struggled to find the correct number. Instead of telling him that he was wrong, I gave him a clue and told him to look at the number line on the whiteboard and to find the number 5. Once he found the number 5, he knew to look at the next number, which was 4.
It is so clear that you are working hard to ‘live’ your inquiry Sophia!