How to Succeed With Questioning

This week, the first two of a series of books entitled 'Little Books of Big Ideas' were launched by Curriculum Corporation. This ambitious project intends to create a comprehensive set of texts, each of which takes a significant educational idea and presents it in an accessible format for busy classroom teachers. If the first two are anything to go on, we are in for a treat.

How to Succeed with Questioning' is one of these and is an invaluable resource for any teacher. True to its name, it is only 64 pages long, smaller than A4 size and takes about an hour to read from cover to cover. The ideas inside these covers, however, are informative and practical. The authors, Sally Godinho and Jeni Wilson, have produced an excellent balance of theoretical background and practical ideas. The intention is to look at the skills of questioning by both teachers and students. Some udeful checklists, categories and tables are provided to allow teachers to consider the kind of questions they ask and the ways they can make questioning skills explicit for students.

The recipe 'how to' formula in the title is perhaps a little deceptive as the authors go to considerable trouble to suggest that different strategies will work with different classes. Whilst warning against 'one right way', Godinho and Wilson have certainly given lots of guidance in terms of where to start in developing a classroom in which good quality questions are valued. The graphics are also somewhat deceptive as they depict young children in a 'cutsie' style. This may put some secondary teachers off the book which would be a great shame as the content is extremely worthwhile for older students and their teachers as well as primary.

This is a text that is certainly worth considering for a school teacher reference collection and beginning teachers would find it particularly valuable in their own bookshelves.

ALEA Victoria News (Newsletter of the Australian Literacy Educators

Term 3, 2004 p5 |

There’s been enough talk across the education sector about student-centred approaches to teaching and learning that you’d be hard-pressed to find any educator comfortable these days to continue with a tried and true ‘sage on the stage’ routine. At the same time, you’re likely to find any number of educators ready to be ‘guides at the sides’ of their students who remain desperate for practical advice. After all, since the principles and policies and rhetorical flourishes have all been said and done, the need now is for practical strategies: okay, okay, experiential, learner-centred cooperative learning communities, I agree already – just show me how to do this stuff.

Luckily, the Little Books of Big Ideas series does exactly that. In How to Succeed with Contracts, How to Succeed with Cooperative Learning, How to Succeed with Creating a Learning Community, How to Succeed with Learning Centres and How to Succeed with Questioning, you’ll find practical reference books that put the detail into what’s often an amorphous concept: lifelong learning. How do you develop individualised learning plans or contracts for a diverse range of students so that activities facilitate and motivate learning? What exactly is a learning community, why should you build one and how do you do it? How do you get your students really learning cooperatively? What might a learning centre look like in your classroom?

Some of the most artful teaching I’ve ever seen was back in the late 1970s in a lower-primary school classroom where many of the practices outlined in this series had been developed by a master practitioner. She’d built a range of ways for her students to learn – without naming them. There was any amount of cooperative learning going on, there was a learning centre, and the classroom was a true learning community. As a secondary teacher in the 1980s, my first assumption was that the sorts of approaches I’d seen in her classroom must only be possible in primary schools since I, like my colleagues, remained chained to the whiteboard. That was a long time ago, at a time when information and communication technologies and the learning possibilities they enable were restricted to two BBCs in a cupboard, and the teaching and learning strategies of educators have moved a good way beyond the fraud at the board. Even so, my feeling is that this series will receive a better reception from facilitator focused primary educators than from secondary educators. I hope I’m wrong.

The Little Books of Big Ideas

series typically suits the classroom-based practitioner, although other titles in the series, which includes How to Succeed with Communication and Conflict Resolution, How to Succeed with Developing Resilience and How to Succeed with Making Schools Inclusive, suit those interested in a school-wide approach to teaching and learning.

Steve Holden in Teacher magazine

May 2005, p.58 | http://www.educare.com.au