Questioning...

Share your thoughts about questioning and evaluating formative assessments. How will you improve upon your questioning techniques? How will you evaluate your students' formative assessments?

You have tremendous freedom in your response to the questioning and evaluating formative assessment blog. Write in a clear, professional manner.

Questions. We use them everyday in everything we do. From the classroom to ordering food at McDonald's, questions are involved. It's how find things out. It's how we get what we need to get done. Thus it only makes sense that we use questions to learn in the classroom. We spoke last week on how "no questions= no learning." 

So in order for me to be an effective teacher I have to pay attention to these questions. I have to watch when I am asking questions and when the students are asking me questions. From my teach and in our classroom I have seen points that will allow me to grow and best utilize the questioning I can use. 

For example, I noticed I asked a lot of close-ended questions..."Do you understand?" "Did you hear what this student said?" "Did your ink change colors?" "Did your time get faster?" 

Instead I could ask, "What is the concept we are learning here?" "What did your ink do?" These questions trigger the student to learning and thinking on their own. In the end they will walk away with a deeper understanding if they figure it out on their own. 

I can also watch the way I ask the questions. Having clear and precise directions on how I want the students to answer can cut down on confusion and chaos. Then having multiple students answer and changing up who answers will allow everyone in the classroom to participate.  Having confidence and spending time on the thought process are places where I can greatly improve. If I ask a question I need to pause and let them think about it. Then allow a student to answer. If they are on the right track or even way off...pause and let them keep thinking and discussing it out loud. Then I can steer them in the right direction instead of jumping the gun and getting to where we want to be by telling them.

By assessing the students I can get a better grasp of what I want to do and whether or not they understand the objectives. The following is a general example of a scoring rubric in Kentucky classroom based on the 1-4 (Novice-Distinguished rating) of how well the student performed.

The same general idea can be applied to the challenge of the students by modifying the category and requirements. For example, my last teach I did a challenge of asking 2 adaptations Simba the lion would have to acquire if he moved to the Arctic and Bowling Green. Also what would these adaptations help in Simba surviving. I could take the rubric and tweak it for answering those questions. 1-Attempted to 4-completely answered the questions with excellent understanding of objective. These kind of rubrics will best help me to observe what the students have actually learned.