Throughout the year many of my lesson plans include high level questions that I plan to pose to the students to get them to stretch their thinking. The questions go beyond “what?” and ask “why?” and “how?”. Carpenter and Johnston both stress the importance of having students explain their thinking when teaching. The most important question you can ask in a math lesson is “how did you get that?” and having the student explain their mathematical reasoning to their peers. This forces the student to take on an “agentive position” while retelling their process to the class. (Johnston, 2004) Once you begin to find out how students approach a problem you, as a teacher, begin to learn more about how they think which in turn can help greatly in knowing what areas need to be revisited or where any mistakes may be happening in their thought process. The same goes for teaching any other subject. When doing a read aloud with the class I always start with a series of questions referring back to what we previously covered. This gives me a chance to understand what things may need more time to be fully grasped and what the students are picking up on. Flexibility is an important quality for a teacher to have and with this kind of informal assessment a teacher can adjust lessons accordingly to the student’s needs.
Bloom’s Taxonomy refers to the different types of learning that can occur in the classroom. At Friends Select School and my own teaching philosophy focuses heavily on two of those levels of learning, cognitive and affective. The questioning used reaches all levels of understanding on the Bloom’s Taxonomy from knowledge all the way up to the highest level of understanding of evaluation.
Below you will see a selection of questions from a variety of lessons I taught at Friends Select School.
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