Have I got a question for you: Chapter 5

Questioning facilitates comprehension and critical thinking and should be used by teachers in classrooms. Easy enough concept, right? It seems this would be the case, but according to Fisher and Frey questioning loses its effectiveness when the teachers do all of the questioning. Teachers rely on the IRE (initiate, respond, evaluate) cycle of questioning which is a teacher centered teaching approach. Teachers should include reciprocal questioning, higher order questioning and many different questioning strategies in order to model and 

Reciprocal questioning includes logos (logic), ethos (writer/writing), and pathos (emotions). These types of questions help students develop an understanding of arguments made by authors or speakers. This helped me in class validate the claims made by the speaker in the TED video.

Higher order thinking (HOT) questions are based on the levels of Bloom's taxonomy. This "balanced" form of questioning is just not that, balanced. The lowest levels make up 70% of all questioning in classrooms, whereas the HOT questions make up only 30% of questions. We as educators must incorporate HOT questions in order to help create successful adults.

There are many strategies explained the two that really interested me were the ReQuest strategy and SQRQCQ strategy. I was interested in ReQuest because it seems like it resembles a game of sorts. The taking turns being the questioner and the respondent makes me think of a game show. I really liked that Fisher and Frey demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategy with ELLs in a social studies class. Not only does this chapter emphasize the usefulness of these strategies with ELLs but also the use of this particular strategy in social studies seems would make it more engaging for the students. The SQRQCQ, or the survey, question, reread, question, compute, and question strategy also focused on ELLs and appeals to me for the main reason that is was specially adapted from the SQ3R strategy to use in math classrooms. I needed strategies such as this in school, especially high school, that would help me break down and comprehend math problems more effectively. This strategy will definitely help me in the near future while teaching math.

As we can see, teachers need to incorporate student-centered questioning in their classrooms in order to help create high functioning future adults. Teachers can do this by reciprocal questioning, HOT questioning and using a variety of instructional strategies in their classrooms.