Social Significance of Patterns of Questioning in Classroom Discourse (#12)

Three things I learned:

• I learned that there is huge implications on your questioning strategies about how you run your classroom and how you feel about the structure of your classroom. On the third page in the third paragraph, Joseph Lukinsky talks about the IRE questioning strategy imposes the idea of teacher having higher power than that of the students in their own education. 
• Because I was a student who wasn't ever afraid to speak up in the classroom, and was relatively bright, I didn't realize until college and through readings such as these, that asking questions with specific right and wrong answers causes for a feeling of an unsafe learning environment.

Two things you found interesting:

• The quote in the first sentence of the third paragraph amazes me simply because it's the opposite of what usually happens in the classroom. Rather than students learning through talk and questioning, many times they are shut down and taught to learn "inside their heads" or by writing, without having that social interaction that is necessary for them to learn. Too often, teachers expect students to stay quiet and just "listen to what the teacher is saying" rather than allowing the social interaction that Courtney B. Cazden is talking about here. 
• It is not to say that low level questions are always wrong, it is just that they should be used to support the essential questions. Drilling students with a million higher level thinking questions will only be frustrating to them, however, if you ask the essential question and then use lower level questioning to get to that essential question, that's okay too!
• When planning a lesson, the essential questions should be known before the lesson begins because they should be based on the standards.

One question you have:

• Is the answer to being able to have an open ended classroom where students lead the learning good classroom management? 

Learning in schools can be enhanced by asking essential questions for multiple reasons.
1. It gets the students engaged because it is NOT memorization so if they don't know the answer they can use their creativity and what they already know to try and come up with the answer.
2. It builds their confidence in their own knowledge because there isn't just one right or wrong answer and the students can figure out multiple right and wrong answers and understand why.
3. The students learn through the communication that goes on when asking essential questions and the talk that occurs within the students' discussions, NOT by what the teacher says.