Blog Post #6

Asking Questions: What questions do we ask? How do we ask?

After seeing that we were going to do a blog post about asking questions, I felt like it would be an interesting topic. Interesting because I have never thought of different ways of asking questions. I thought a question was just a question. Then I saw the question that we have to answer in this post, What do we need to know about asking questions to be an effective teacher? Oh dear, this is going to be interesting in trying to answer.
After watching Asking better questions in the classroom by Joanne Chesley, I have a better understanding about asking questions. In the video she mentions two types of questions someone can ask, open ended and close ended questions. Open ended questions "leaves the form of the answer up to the person who is responding", doing this one can get many different answers because the question is being answered by different people. Close ended questions will give the student the answer, this answer being a simple yes or no. An example of a close ended question would be "Did you eat dinner?", this the response would be a yes or a no. However, an open ended question would be asking "What did you eat for dinner?", doing this would have the response being different than a yes or no. I have taken a class before where the professor would ask us to raise our hands if we thought an answer was yes or no. The professor then followed by picking someone who answered yes and someone who answered no and ask them why they picked that answer. Asking this way switched from a close ended question to an open ended question.
The Right Way to Asking Questions in the Classroom by Ben Johnson pointed out that sometimes teachers expect the student to know things if they do not ask a question at the end of a lesson. I like how he said in his post "The fallacy with this thinking is that sometimes the students do not understand that they do not understand, and if they do not know what they do not know, there is no way that they can ask a question about it." After reading this my first thought was "Yes! Finally someone gets it." There have been plenty of times where I have been in that situation in a class.
The way we present questions will determine the answer we get in return. After reading different post, I now have a better understanding of how to ask questions to get class participation. I look forward to trying it out to my students in my classroom someday as well as hearing the answers I will get.