ABSTRACT

Imagine asking one of your neighbours, ‘How many legs has an insect got?’, or, ‘What is three-quarters, expressed as a decimal?’ In normal life you would probably be locked away if you went up to people and asked them large numbers of questions, the answers to which you already knew. It would be regarded as a somewhat rude invasion of their privacy, a breach of their personal space, or even as an extremely weird form of behaviour. Yet regular interrogation is part of the normal repertoire of teachers’ classroom skills. Every day teachers ask dozens, even hundreds of questions, thousands in a single year, over a million during a professional lifetime. Intelligent questioning is a valuable part of interactive teaching. Inept handling of questions, however, leads to confusion and misunderstanding. Questions are often a central part of explanations – which we describe more fully in Explaining in the Primary School in this series – and so lie at the very heart of successful teaching.