What if teachers stopped shouting “Silence in the classroom!” and started letting students ask questions? Jane Smith tried it with her class – and was thrilled with the results.
After spending a fascinating half hour talking to a friend’s four-year-old daughter, I was reminded how innately curious children are. She was a really bubbly character who wanted to know everything! Why are you not living here? Do you have little girls? How old are you? It was a real barrage of curiosity – totally refreshing and very funny at times.
It got me wondering - how do we go from being curious, confident, outspoken four year olds to eleven-year-olds who are happy to sit passively and be told what to do? The probing questions from the four year old lacked any form of guise - she wanted to know so she asked! No worries for her about getting the question wrong. She was unconcerned about looking silly or asking an inappropriate question. She was confident that I was with was as interested in her as she was in me.
This made me question my classroom practice. As an AST, I’m fortunate enough to attend many training courses. A few years ago I attended a course where I learned that 95% of the questions in the classroom come from the teacher. I wanted to test the theory. I decided to use a year 11 class that I had been teaching for about a year.
I asked one of the pupils to observe the lesson and record only the questions that were posed by pupils. After an hour of torture, being acutely aware of what he was doing and knowing that the results were going to show a real issue, I looked in horror at the questions. Pupils were compliant and pleasant - there were no issues of discipline. All the pupils undertook the task I set and no one said anything other than: “Can I go to Matron’s and get a hot water bottle?’ On the surface it seemed like a productive lesson. But it was clear that the pupils thought their role was to receive information and were happy to be passive.