Week 6 Workshop - Classroom Observation: Questioning

This blog post is terribly unexciting, I'm sure.  Apologies for that... carry on.  :)

My task for the day was to observe the questioning that occurs when my cooperating teacher cycles the room, assisting students.  The focus for today was reducing fractions to their simplest form.  Thus, the questions observed were along the lines of:

• Can someone tell us a number that goes into 20 and 100?
• What did you do here, [Student X]?
• What happened down here to make the denominator go from 3 to 9?
• Is the fraction in simplest form?
• Can you tell me why you chose B?

Luckily, there are a few instances of open-ending questioning mixed in there, which is ideal when questioning students.  Granted, when they are truly at a loss for where to go next, it becomes essential to do a bit of scaffolding via leading questions.

We sort of shifted gears from there to talk about the sum of the measures of the angles of quadrilaterals.  There wasn't much exploratory learning here, and it should have been review.  The questions asked were of the form:

• How many degrees are there inside a triangle [sic]?  Okay, then how many are inside a rectangle?
• But, didn't you just tell me that the sum of the measures of the angles in a quadrilateral is 360 degrees?
• Did you do this another way, [Student Y]?

None too exciting, really.  They were a bit more leading than the above questions, which may have been a byproduct of being pressed for time.

As for the type of questions that I would like to ask in my classroom, I don't think they would be far removed from the first set of questions.  There would be a few questions that check for understanding, some leading questions where necessary, and a mixture of open-ended questions.  I do like asking students to explain their reasoning in an effort to get them practicing the use of mathematical language.