“Can you give me three reasons for the outbreak of the Second World War?”

“The damaging Treaty of Versailles, opportunism and the invasion of Czechoslovakia.’

“Great. Let’s move on…”

We have all done it. Under pressure to “get through” the curriculum, we ask one child for an answer to a complex question, receive a satisfactory response and take that as a proxy for the understanding of the other students.

Clearly, this is absurd. A swimming teacher would not take one child’s ability to swim 10 metres as proof that all the others can. This is the equivalent of bad questioning.

Questioning, then, is at the very heart of great teaching, offering teachers live feedback about where students are in their learning and, when done skilfully, it allows teachers to take the pulse of a whole class of students.

The types of question teachers can ask

1. Factual questions

• What is 4 x 4?
• What is the function of chlorophyll in plants?
• What is the name of Macbeth’s best friend at the start of the play?

This type of question often gets caricatured as a “bad question” because it is not “open”.

Closed questions, however, are vital in classrooms because they establish inarguable facts, rules and laws that are required for more nuanced questioning regarding opinions and perspectives.

Think of these questions as the foundations of a house, absolutely required for the next stage of the building. Outstanding teachers use these at the start of a new topic or to reinforce non-negotiable knowledge.

2. Convergent questions

Once key knowledge has been established, a teacher can begin to ask convergent questions.

• Why did Hitler invade Poland?
• Using the formula for the area of a circle, what is the area of a lawn with a radius of 5 metres?

These are to guide students towards a particular answer, and teachers need to use these in a classroom to funnel student thinking.

In maths, convergent questions often build upon a fact towards a similar non-negotiable answer, but one that is broader and deeper than the earlier factual answer.

In history, there may be multiple “right” convergent answers, but also clear wrong ones; Hitler did not invade Poland, for example, because he wanted to improve the lives of Jewish Poles. That is wrong.

English is similar. A questioning sequence may look like this:

• Factual: What is the name of Willy Loman’s eldest son in Death of a Salesman?
• Answer: Biff
• Convergent: Why is Biff dissatisfied with his life?
   

3. Divergent questions

Next, divergent questions. Once fundamentals have been established, an outstanding teacher can begin to prompt learners to diversify their thinking.

• What would happen if I blew this ping pong ball through that flame?
• What would have happened if John F Kennedy had led a full term as president?
• How could you create warmth in that watercolour if you only had white and blue?

To answer any divergent question, students need accurate knowledge first.

Take the second example, regarding JFK. No person can answer that without knowing, for example, Kennedy’s take on America’s place in the world, what the Cold War was, what we mean by domino theory and how Kennedy died.

Of course, you also have to know how to pull a student back from a divergent answer that veers too much from what is a suitable answer:

Teacher: “What would happen if I blew this ping pong ball through that flame?”

Student A: “The flame would go out.”

Teacher: “Would it? I’m not so sure. Try again…”

Student A: “The ball would burn?”

Teacher: “Correct. What made you change to thinking the ball would burn?”
 

4. Evaluative questions

These are the most sophisticated type of question because they ask students to build on fundamental understandings and make judgements, and are useful when teachers are looking to tease out opinions.

• Given our results, how accurate was our hypothesis?
• What are the similarities and differences between the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan?

Evaluative questions can also expose learning gaps because a student’s opinion on, for example, the accuracy of a hypothesis can only hold relevance if their understanding of the results of an experiment are strong.

Take my second example above. Without knowledge of two completely different historical events, their political context, military strategy and the geography and history of both countries, a student’s answer would be hollow.

Evaluative questions can happen from kindergarten up, and need not be the sole possession of high-school teachers.

Questioning is an area that all teachers understand the importance of. All of us, however, suffer from the limits of time, leading to “dead end” questions that can result in good student answers not being built upon, a focus upon pace in a classroom instead of exploration, and moving on in the learning before we get a better understanding of everyone’s knowledge.

To quote Dylan Wiliam, effective teachers use questioning to inform “decisions, not data collection”.

Andy Bayfield is assistant principal at St Mary’s International School in Tokyo, Japan