Few things will be as critical to the success of your seminar from week to week as the questions used to start a discussion and, equally as important, the ones used to move that discussion toward an inquiry into the less obvious, more complex aspects of the subject at hand. The goals that you should always have in mind are as follows.
- That all members of the group participate.
- That they respond to one another, as well as to you.
- That they gain new insights into the material and sharpen their analytical and critical skills.
This section is aimed at helping you learn to employ questions effectively in part by posing them to your students and in part by training your students to ask them of each other, and of you.
CATEGORIES OF QUESTIONS
What follows is a classification of the major kinds of questions which you may have occasion to use in teaching a first year seminar.
Diagnostic Questions. These are broad, open-ended questions that call for making a judgment about the nature of the material being examined. For example:
- What does the rise of the “militia” movement suggest about the depth of division in American society?
Such questions provide a springboard for expanding a discussion and are especially useful when students feel comfortable about voicing their opinions and exploring disagreements.
Action Questions. These are questions that ask students to make realistic suggestions about what to do in a specific situation. For example:
- What you would do if you were advising President Obama about an upcoming summit on air pollution and he wanted you to come up with a position paper?
Questions of Extension and Synthesis. These are questions that ask students to make connections
- How does John’s comment about homophobia tie in to our discussion of James Baldwin’s short story “The Stranger”?
- Can you carry your plan for a hostile takeover of Acme Corporation a bit further?
Questions of Priority or Ranking. These questions ask students to make choices based on value judgment. They are particularly effective in first year seminars. For example:
- In order of importance, what are the five essential qualities of a good relationship
- What is the most pressing problem in our society today?
Challenge Questions. These are used to test a student’s ability to back up a position that he or she has taken. For example:
- Why do you think James Cameron is a better filmmaker than Martin Scorsese?
- What’s the evidence to support your claim that women mature emotionally sooner than men?
Clarification Questions. While perhaps obvious now, in the heat of a discussion questions such as “what do you mean by that?” can be very effective in moving the discussion into a more analytical mode.
Factual Questions. The seemingly self-evident approach of asking for specific pieces of in- formation, when used together with some of the other questioning techniques discussed here, is a useful way to start a discussion. It creates an expectation of concrete, focused answers. This, in turn, has a beneficial effect on the rest of the discussion. For example:
- Who was John Muir and what did he do? How important do you think his contribution has turned out to be?
Hypothetical Questions. These are questions that encourage students to be imaginative, yet accurate in terms of the material being discussed. For example: - If you were in charge of the Madden NFL Football gaming franchise, what would you do to keep it popular?
Summarizing Questions. These are questions designed to tie together the ideas that have been generated during a discussion. Having one or two prepared to use as a closing device is always good practice. For example:
- What are the real lessons to be learned from such political scandals as “Watergate,” the Iran/Contra affair, and the Clinton impeachment trial?
THE PROCESS OF ASKING QUESTIONS
Developing varied kinds of questions is only half the battle, however. When incorporating the use of questions into a discussion, you need to understand something about the dynamics of learning, both in terms of individual styles and in terms of group interaction.
How questions are asked, who asks them, and the contexts — intellectual and procedural
— for asking them all influence their effectiveness.
Becoming familiar with the following techniques and sensitivities concerning the use of questions in small-group discussions should help you maximize, first, the insights and information shared by your students and, secondly, their sense of engagement, of being part of the group’s attempts to grapple with the material for the day.
Getting Started. When it’s time to begin a question-and-answer discussion during a given class meeting, do not hesitate to have the group arrange itself appropriately. Either have students sit around a large table or in a single-row circle, so that everyone can see and make easy eye contact with each other.
Aiming Questions. The questioner needs to decide whether to ask questions of a particular individual or of the whole group. (However, special care should be taken not to put shy students on the spot.) If the decision is made to pose questions of the whole group, then the questioner should try to make eye contact with everyone. Be sure that students sitting in all parts of the room, or places around the table, have a chance to answer.
Calling on an individual may help get a slow class going, and it can also keep the other students on their toes.
Avoid “Pre-programmed” Questions. Be very careful not to formulate a sequence of questions that is pre-programmed to answer itself. Such questions turn a discussion from an exercise in getting students to think critically into a game of guessing what the questioner wants the students to say.
For example, if you ask your class, “Why did you all decide on plastic foam as the material out of which to build your “dream house,” avoid the trap of also asking them if they were persuaded by the architect who visited class last week.
This problem tends to be a function of the instructor being overly anxious and not allowing students enough time to answer the initial query. At its worst, preprogramming ends up limiting the discussion to a series of “yes” or “no” responses.
By asking only the original question and resisting the tendency to follow up with the “hint” question, preprogramming can be avoided altogether.
Waiting for Answers. One of the hardest things for anyone posing questions to do is wait for an answer. Long silences in a group setting are looked on by most of us as rather uncomfortable. Yet they can be turned to good advantage if the questioner shows no signs of anxiety or nervousness.
Avoid the temptation to begin immediately repeating the question, rephrasing it, or adding further information (such as pre-programmed follow-up questions). Instead, as dif fi cult as it may seem, learn to be patient. A good rule of thumb is to wait at least thirty seconds before making any change in your question.
Keep in mind that leaving sufficient time between asking and rephrasing questions gives students a chance to think and shows concern for the learning process. Adding a phrase like “take a moment and think about it” to the asking of a question can be helpful in this regard. One must avoid, at all costs, getting into the habit of answering his or her own questions. Similarly, when one of the leaders is the questioner, the other leader should never jump in and answer.
PUTTING INTO USE A PREPARED “LINE” OF QUESTIONING
Experienced instructors, in some ways like attorneys getting ready to examine a witness (though obviously for quite different reasons), learn to prepare a set of related questions, for a given class, the aim of which is to get a discussion past the level of anecdote and impressions.
Having a prepared line to follow means that the questioner can direct the discussion into perti- nent areas of inquiry: examinations of speci fi c information, themes, or controversies which relate the material under consideration to the ongoing concerns of the seminar.
What follows is a common but very effective questioning pattern which helps you tackle the problem of shaping students’ answers into a fruitful discussion.
1. Begin the discussion with a question that engages the material at hand in a way that is comfortable and perhaps calls for a little imagination. This might be a question that can be answered from general experience or from basic information. For example, suppose you are discussing Plato’s Republic in a fi rst year seminar dealing with utopian visions. You might begin by asking such questions as:
- Keeping in mind what Plato had to say about the ideal state, what do you think the components of an effective government are?
- Based on your own experience, what are the characteristics of a good leader?
2. Then “shift gears.” Ask questions that require the group to think about and explain relationships among different aspects of the subject which were brought out in the first round of answers. In other words, after establishing that students have a basic understanding of The Republic, you can begin to explore the relationships among important elements in the book.
- Why does Plato ban poetry from his republic?
- How did Athenian society compare with the ideal social order of the republic?
3. Finally, end with comparison and contrast questions. These require the formulation of more general concepts which help deepen the understanding of the complex issues being tack- led by the syllabus as a whole. These could very well also be questions that ask students, as twentieth-century Americans, to challenge their own value systems.
- How does the concept of the ideal state in The Republic stand up against that implicit in the U.S. Constitution? in Das Kapital?