The readings for this week really made me think about the
importance of the way that the teacher scaffolds and asks questions. The questions that are asked of the
class before, during, and after lessons can truly make or break the students’
understanding and appreciation of what they have been taught. It is easy for teachers to just stick
to the “basic” questions during instruction, not attempting to push student
thinking above and beyond. As
discussed in the Thinking Through A Lesson article, if teachers take time
during planning to actually stop and think about what the main goals of each
lesson are, they can come up with a list of questions to bring up that can give
children a more complex grasp on the material. Asking students to provide detailed answers and reasoning
for the way they are solving problems (both in math and in other subjects) will
allow the teacher to get a sense of whether their students are really
understanding the main objectives or are just skating by on the bare minimum.
This idea of scaffolding questions was further explored in Eggleton’s
article about The Value of Mistakes.
Taking one student’s mistakes or misunderstandings and shaping them into
a learning experience for the entire class is a great way to encourage students
to take their thinking to a more critical level. Instead of simply telling a student that their reasoning is
incorrect, teachers can instead pose questions to the rest of the class about the
topic. By challenging the students
in the article to both defend their own positions and determine the correctness
of their peers in the “least to greatest” line, the teacher was able to let the
students work through the math concepts on their own rather than explicitly
telling them that they were in the right or wrong spot. Additionally, asking them questions
like “why is Michael so far from the rest of the group?” forced the students to
access their previous knowledge of place values and ordering to explain why the
number 4000 was so far away from decimals like .04. I believe that if more teachers were willing to take the
time to think about what questions might arise before actually carrying
out their lessons and coming up with alternate questions to ask to challenge
students to come up with answers on their own, children would be able to get a
lot more value out of math instruction.
