ABSTRACT

Questioning is the oxygen of effective teaching. Questioning is so natural-from birth, our curiosity drives us to ask millions of questions-that we do it unthinkingly. The key to asking great questions is to know our students. We can once more employ the 'Goldilocks principle' to our questioning approach: not too easy, not too hard, but just right, in terms of the degree of difficulty. Closed questions are often essential in taking a litmus test response to knowledge. A confident learner needs to know where they are going, what the standard of success looks like, and what they need to do to meet that high standard. The teacher needs to facilitate this state of affairs. Feedback is an essential tool to help make this happen. All the available evidence points to the fact that feedback works. It is top of the tree; the king of teaching strategies.