How can questions improve dialogues with students?

Do your dialogues with students ever feel difficult, frustrating, or at cross-purposes? Do students leave a discussion feeling unsatisfied, or that their questions haven’t really been answered?

These were some of the questions that we set out to answer recently in a cross-disciplinary project at the University of Edinburgh. The research involved teachers and students in Informatics, Education and Veterinary Science, and aimed to explore, through semi-structured interviews,  the dialogues that take place between teachers and students and the questions that prompt those dialogues.

You can read more here about our key findings in this Teaching Matters Blog post

Here, I want to focus on some of the strategies informed by the research findings,

which may help to improve dialogues.

This project was about dialogues, and we are keen that dialogues with others feed back into the research. In that vein, these strategies are suggestions - they may not work for you, or in your particular context. You may have others which you would like to share, and we encourage you to do so in the comments below.

Strategies:

Asking questions was suggested as a strategy by both teachers and students. Questions could be used as an alternative to giving a straight answer to a students’ question in a number of different ways, for example challenging students to apply their knowledge, or as part of a socratic dialogue in which questions help to guide students’ thinking, or as a tool for starting a dialogue.

1) Using questions to probe prior knowledge

The strategy of a teacher responding with a question when a student asks a question, in order to find out what students’ level of prior knowledge is before answering, was suggested by this student after a frustrating experience with a lecturer.

               

I think it’s better to try to use common terminologies or maybe when he or she want to explain something, ask the student, ‘do you know, x, y, z?’ And if not, maybe give recommendation, ‘read this material or x, y, z is blah blah blah blah’. [Masters Student]

2) Questions to generate thinking

Questions can also be used as a way to check students’ understand of the answers you’ve given them, and also as a way to help students to think through questions for themselves

as explained by this teacher:

‘If they say to me, “what is this or what is this structure?”, then often I say, “well what is this structure and how do you think this works?” Turning the question round into different ones so that they can then answer it themselves.’  (Lecturer)

3) Creating dialogue through open rather than closed questions

Questions were valuable for teachers trying to find out the level of prior knowledge of their students, and hence how to frame the answer to the question. However, as one demonstrator explains, students’ answers may be misleading.

‘I said, “so do you know what a static method is?”, to which he replied, “yes”. And then I said, “well okay the reason this isn’t working is cause it’s a static method”. And he then sort of stared blankly at me for a bit.’ (Demonstrator)

In this example it became clear to the demonstrator that the student did not in fact know what a ‘static method’ was and this led to the conversation going round in circles - a frustrating experience for both teacher and student.

The solution here is to find ways to ask open rather than closed questions. A closed question typically has a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, whereas in an open question the student has to give a longer answer which reveals more detail about their understanding. The demonstrator came to this solution while reflecting on this experience and offered this advice:

‘So phrase the question so that they clearly had to answer, so that they had to give me a clear answer to what a static method was in order for the conversation to go past that point.’ (Demonstrator)

4) Be Proactive  - ask students the first question

Another strategy suggested particularly by demonstrators in laboratory based classes, was to be proactive in approaching students.

One teacher talked about the skill of reading students’ body language to see whether or not they were struggling.

‘So you look to see them reading and rereading the instructions….but they’re gazing into space.  And you can tell they don’t know what to do but they’re too scared to ask…So in that class I have to start the conversations’. (Demonstrator)

In this situation students are often reluctant to ask a question  - if they are stuck and do not know what to do, then asking help can feel like losing face.  Here demonstrators can start the conversation by approaching students.

As always, balance is key here, as another teacher commented:

I see myself as trying to strike the balance of being sensitive to a student not being confident, but at the same time trying to encourage them to be involved and to ask questions. (Lecturer)

How can questions improve dialogues with students? by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.