Intended outcomes

The intended outcomes of this activity are for you to:

Learn that

• Questioning is an essential tool for teachers; questions can be used for many purposes, including to check pupils’ prior knowledge, assess understanding and break down problems.
• High quality classroom talk can support pupils to articulate key ideas, consolidate understanding and extend their vocabulary.
• Effective assessment is critical to teaching because it provides teachers with information about pupils’ understanding and needs.
• Good assessment helps teachers avoid being over-influenced by potentially misleading factors, such as how busy pupils appear.
• High-quality feedback can be written or verbal; it is likely to be accurate and clear, encourage further effort, and provide specific guidance on how to improve.

Learn how to stimulate pupil thinking and check for understanding, by:

• Including a range of types of questions in class discussions to extend and challenge pupils (e.g. by modelling new vocabulary or asking pupils to justify answers).
• Providing appropriate wait time between question and response where more developed responses are required.

Learn how to check prior knowledge and understanding during lessons, by:

• Using assessments to check for prior knowledge and pre-existing misconceptions.
• Structuring tasks and questions to enable the identification of knowledge gaps and misconceptions (e.g. by using common misconceptions within multiple-choice questions).
• Prompting pupils to elaborate when responding to questioning to check that a correct answer stems from secure understanding.
• Monitoring pupil work during lessons, including checking for misconceptions.