How many questions do you ask?

Did you know the average teacher asks between 300-400 questions a day! Wow that's a lot of questions if you ask me. I don't know if I could think of more than 300 questions to ask each and ever day.

But these questions are more than what did you learn or how does this system work. Rather these questions are used as a tool to gauge what students know, what they have learned, and what you need to go back and reteach because every word that just came out of your mouth for the past ten minutes flew right over their heads. You can also use questions to develop interest in the subject and boost motivation. I think this is often over looked when we consider questions and what their purpose is. Questions can also be used to develop thinking skills. Now what are thinking skills? Thinking Skills are " the mental processes we use to do things like: solve problems, make decisions, ask questions, make plans, pass judgements, organize information and create new ideas."

Questions come in levels, like everything else we learn it ties into Blooms Taxonomy (I think I am finally beginning to see how important Bloom is...just kidding...I know he is important). With one of the reading we had this week there was an awesome chart that had what questions went along with lower level questions and higher level questions. I couldn't find the exact chart but this one is just as useful! The link to this chart since its hard to see.

Now about those levels of questions...there are higher-leveled questions and lower-level questions. Higher-level questions require complex application, analysis, syntheses and evaluation skills where lower-level questions use knowledge and comprehension. In case you didn't realize these are all "steps"  on Bloom's Taxonomy.

As a future educator its important to remember that questions are here to help us not hurt us. But questions can hurt our students if we don't give them proper time to answer, give them positive feedback, or handle their answers properly.  Its important to remember that we were once students and that feeling we got when the teacher called on us to answer a questions we had no idea what the answer the teacher wanted, and remember we should never want a student to feel that way.

That's all for now. Check back in for more updates on my path to becoming an Agricultural Educator and all the fun I've been having along the way.