From time-to-time, I get asked the question: ‘If you had to pick just one thing, what would you recommend teachers focus on developing in their practice?’ We’ll come to my answer shortly.

Before we do, I think it is worth taking a step back and asking: What is the one thing that our teaching should really be aiming to achieve?

At this point, you may thinking, ‘Well, there are lots of things, actually’. And of course, you would be right. However, if I pushed you to nail down the aim of teaching to just one thing – the most important thing - what would you say? Feel free to pause and think about that for a moment.

Having thought about this a lot myself, I find that I keep returning to the same answer. For me, the one thing that our teaching should really be aiming to achieve is for all students to learn what we plan for them to learn. To what extent do you agree?

Thinking

You might agree, or you might not, but I think it is important that you understand where I’m coming from. Because I believe learning is the core purpose of school, I believe thinking is the most important thing for students to be doing in lessons. There is a consistency of message from cognitive science and educational research that thinking is the key to learning. The more we can get students to think about particular things, the harder we can get them to think about these, and the more we can get them to come at this thinking from ‘different angles’, the more likely it is that students will learn what we want them to.

We need to focus on thinking.

Returning to the question posed at the start of this article, this is why I believe that the one thing that most teachers should focus on developing in their practice is their questioning. A focus on developing both the specific questions we ask and the way we ask these should help teachers to make their teaching even better than it is already.

The questions we ask

By their nature, questions promote thinking. The more we ask questions, the more students are likely to think, and therefore, the more students are likely to learn.

Now, I would like to ask you some more questions:

1. Do you think that, typically, you ask enough questions in your lessons?
2. On average, how many questions do you believe you ask in a typical lesson?
3. Have you ever counted the number of questions you ask in a lesson?

In his paper Principles of Instruction, Barak Rosenshine suggests that the most successful teachers are those that spend at least half of the available lesson time asking questions. As a rule of thumb, I suggest that for every minute of teacher exposition, we should be aiming to ask at least one question. In other words, if a lesson lasts 40 minutes, we should be aiming to ask 20 questions. Is this something you believe you could achieve in a lesson? Pause and think about that for a moment.

While the purpose of this Education Scotland blog is not to debate the merits of teacher-led pedagogy vs student-led approaches (if you are interested in that, I suggest you read any one of my books), I will use this article to suggest that teacher-led pedagogy usually lends itself better to students thinking about specific things, in particular ways, than student-led approaches, such as discovery learning.

The way we ask questions

Asking good questions is one thing. Asking them in a way that gets all students to think is another. It takes great skill to be able to do this effectively. In my opinion, it is one of the most challenging things for a teacher to do well.

If asking questions to make all students think is something you would like to get better at, here are some techniques you might want to focus on building into your teaching, or developing further:

1. Show-me boards. If you aren’t already using show-me boards as a matter of routine in (almost) every lesson, I would suggest you start doing so. Show-me boards encourage all students to think and all students to commit to a specific answer. They also make the thinking of all students visible to the teacher, so we can respond to individuals or the class as a whole, either immediately or at some point in the future. Show-me boards are a teacher’s best friend.
2. Pause. Many teachers are afraid of silence. However, silence can also be a teacher’s friend. Often, we need silence so that thinking can take place. If you can get into the habit of asking a question and pausing for a few seconds, embracing the silence, then it is more likely that more students will think about the questions you ask than if you quickly jump to choose a student to answer (or, worse, allow shouting out). To help with this, try getting into the habit of using phrases such as ‘Everyone think about that’ or ‘Think – everyone’ each time you ask a question.
3. Bounce. When a student answers a question, the natural temptation is to give feedback – we want to tell them if they are right or wrong. However, if instead, you ‘bounce’ the same question to another student – and nobody knows who that other student is going to be – then you encourage more students to think. For example, you might say, ‘Do you agree or disagree with that, Max?’ or ‘Ellie, could you say a bit more than what Jemma has just said?’. As with every other technique, the key to getting really good at this is to practise it in a deliberate way.

‘Show-me boards’, ‘Pause’ and ‘Bounce’ are just three Trusted Techniques that you might like to focus on developing in your practice to help encourage more students to think. For a deeper discussion of these, and a wider exploration of questioning in general, you might like to explore my book, The Teaching Delusion 3: Power Up Your Pedagogy, or the soon-to-be published, Power Up Your Pedagogy: The Illustrated Handbook of Teaching. Whether you choose to do that or not, I hope this has been useful at encouraging you to think. If nothing else, please keep in mind that encouraging students to think is the key to helping students to learn.