In preparing your lesson plans, you will need to decide when and how you will check for your students’ understanding of the content.
In other words, you need to plan what kind of questions you will ask. Script your questions out, and designate space in your lesson plans to ask them.
Here are a few strategies for crafting good questions :
- Ask open-ended questions rather than closed-ended questions (questions that require a simple “yes” or “no” answer). Open-ended questions allow for a variety of response types.
- Ask questions that necessitate elaboration.
- Ask “why” or “how” questions – or questions that require the use of the word “because” in the answer. This will help make your lessons more engaging, and will encourage your students to use more academic language.
However, just asking questions is not enough – you know that lots of time no one answers the questions you ask! So how will you elicit student responses? Yep – you have to plan for this, too.
A few strategies to help with this:
- Prompt.
- Use wait time (both levels of wait time).
- Use pick-sticks.
- Give time for turn and talks.
- Ask students to write their answers in a journal.
- Plan Learning Tasks