Questioning

Too little effort is spent helping educators ask effective questions. Teacher educators rarely take the time to teach questioning skills; when they do, the questioning process is often treated either in a cursory manner' or in such a highly technical way that its operative value is itself questionable.2 Furthermore, prospective teachers seldom have the opportunity to observe a good questioner at work.3 Yet, questioning is perhaps the central skill in the teaching-learning experience, because, whether we know it or not, we bombard our students with all kinds of inquiries throughout the day. Teachers fail to realize just how many questions they ask. Summarizing the few research studies done on the questioning process, Seymour Sarason reports that while elementary teachers thought they averaged between 12 and 20 questions per half hour, the actual number ranged between 45 and 150.4 In our work with teachers we have found that the questions they ask seem to fall into three broad categories-factual, conceptual, and contextual. Most educators ask adequate factual questions, but either ignore (or ask infrequently) questions that necessitate conceptual

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