Blog Assignment # 6

Before I was enrolled in EDM 310, I had been drilled by teachers about my understanding of a subject. By drilled I mean I was given an excessive amount of information, asked a yes or no question of my understanding, and then given a test. I began to believe that this was the only way a teacher should teach. As a future educator myself, I was taking notes on the ways of teaching to develop ideas on how I would teach my future students. Upon arriving in EDM 310, I was given a whole new set of learning rules. Rules that require me to discover for myself, not only what the answer is, but how to best achieve the answer. This helped me realize that teachers are only beneficial to their students when they give them the tools to learn rather than drill them with information and expect them to fully understand a subject. By asking questions, that do not require a yes or no answer, teachers can be better aware of their students' understanding. Question are key to the evaluations of students progress and understanding. In Ben Johnson's article in Edutopia, entitled The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom, I learned that you can not assume that students know everything. I also learned that when asking questions in a classroom you should ask yourself what you want your students to learn from the questions. Simply asking a student if they understand a subject is not enough. Ben Johnson explains that students fill out their teachers to decide what answers the teacher wants to hear. Students may give a yes or no answer, or maybe no answer at all, and still have little to no understanding of a subject. By asking questions the teacher can evaluate for themselves how well a student understands a subject.



On Faculty Focus I read an article entitled Three Ways to Ask Better Questions in the Classroom written by Maryellen Weimer. She explains that there are three things you must do in order to ask better questions. The first thing is to prepare the questions. By preparing questions before hand, the teacher is more organized and minimizes the risk of asking confusing, hard to answer questions. She then says you must play with the questions. She says that "questions are most powerful, when they best engage students, and when they are at their thought-provoking best". She says that questions are most engaging before the answer is given and by playing with the questions, you can create a longer window for thought. Lastly she suggests that as a teacher you should preserve good questions. She says that good questions can be reused and even altered to make better questions. She even claims that good questions, asked by students, can be saved to ask again in the future. She tells teachers that "we should be working on our questioning techniques, not just because our questions are more effective when skillfully used. We need to ask good questions so that students see the importance of questions."

The advice given on questioning students in a classroom given by these two authors, will be very good to keep in mind for my future classrooms. I am learning in the EDM 310 class, that teaching is a lot more than filling a student with information, its about helping them learn how to learn.