The importance of questioning

Questioning matters across your school. It is the skill that underpins so much of what teachers do. Teachers assess, challenge and prompt learning by asking questions. Where teaching is concerned, the use of questioning is one of the most effective tools for improving your school. It can:

demonstrate high expectations

When used well, questioning can demonstrate a teacher’s high expectations of their pupils and offer their pupils a means of reaching those expectations. When used throughout a school, questioning techniques can help to confirm the effectiveness of the school’s overall teaching provision, because they lead to improved learning conditions.

prevent passivity, anxiety or flippancy

When used appropriately, questioning can iron out the risk of pupils becoming passive or anxious in lessons, or of them trivialising your question. Instead, questioning can improve pupils’ access to learning and give them the confidence to contribute.

improve pupils’ responses

With judicious use, your questioning technique can enable you to improve pupils’ responses to your questions by helping you to think about how you expect them to respond, then letting that determine how you ask the question. Once you have used the techniques explained in this resource for a while, you will be able to spot the positive effect of a good question when it occurs, remember it, and then apply the same technique next time.

Questioning is the only stand-alone teaching skill named in Ofsted’s School Inspection Handbook. Inspectors are guided to assess the impact of questioning on assessment and the extent to which questions challenge and set demanding expectations.

Getting more for your ask

Despite its importance, there is a frequently observed truth about questioning: teachers ask great questions, but they don’t always get the responses their questions deserve. Active Questioning offers a solution to this problem.

It’s in the ask. By adjusting how you ask questions, you get better responses. This is because the technique used to ask the question is as important as the question itself. Active Questioning helps you to ‘get more for your ask’.

Good answers are yours for the asking. There are no secrets to effective questioning. Where teachers have applied the simple approaches described in this resource, they have seen a better response for their ask (and inspectors have noticed too).