Designing Questions

Running with the theme of classroom connection and making meaningful relationships with students from my last blog post comes the idea of how to design relevant questions in relation to academic content. As someone who is aspiring to be an educator, it is becoming increasingly important for me to ensure that my future students feel connected to and engaged with the content they are learning. I am coming to understand that a crucial part of this task will be my ability to create multiple opportunities for students to enter into intentional conversation about the material learned. This video from the Teaching Channel does a fantastic job of explaining why it is so critical for teachers to design purposeful questions for their students.

In creating these all-important questions, it will be necessary to incorporate different levels of entry into the conversation so that all students have the opportunity to participate. This video from the Teaching Channel explains that leveled questions are a massive help in the classroom. As portrayed in this video, this example of intentional design has a series of three questions. First comes an idea that ALL students can access. This could be an opportunity for teachers to recognize that there are more than one type of learner in the classroom. The next in the series is something that is more specific and requires a more critical view of the content. The last question pertains to something that students can personally relate to or find common ground with. This structure of scaffolded questions allows for students to become more confident with the material, demonstrate their deeper understanding of the content, and make connections as to how their learning is relevant to their lives and the world.

I believe that designing questions is something that I will come to have a better understanding of throughout my education as well as over the course of my teaching career. Learning how I can best cater to the needs of my students so they are challenged but also ready to deliberately contribute to conversation is something that is going to take time and careful thought.

As a closing thought, I will leave you with this quote (from the first video!) that I find to be very inspiring.

“As educators, we are the nurturers. And it’s okay to kind of take the training wheels off and just let go and see what happens.”