Why was I so impressed by the glimpse I had of a young newly qualified teacher in an East Birmingham secondary school in the third week of November?  Was it because she interrupted her lesson for only as long as it took to say hello before resuming her speculative conversation which involved every one of her 20 or so Year 8 pupils?  Or was it the nature and tempo of her questions that flowed rhythmically, almost dance-like to and fro from open-ended to enquiries of opinion or fact to rhetorical summing up?  Was it because as she swung back and forth from the blackboard she included every child - indeed so effectively that I and the Head Teacher might as well have not been in the room so magnetic was her impact on her pupils?  (She may have noticed us, but they did not.)  And what had she got in common with the other teacher I had seen three weeks earlier in Handsworth who was kneeling with her arm around the back of a chair insisting to the 14 year old lad, with a warm certainty that brooked no denial, that he could understand if only he would trust her long experience and put in the effort to master a particular concept?  If it was not classroom organisation - one was whole class the other individually organised - was it perhaps the pace of their lessons?

It is at times like these that I wonder why it was that nobody taught me anything about questions and their differentiation, distribution and sequence when I trained?  After all, was not Socrates (the patron saint of teachers) at it all those years ago?  Yet it is more than that, isn’t it, because after all his context and example was of a slave society where education was a privilege and questioning geared towards those with a particular sort of intelligence?  Though do we know more about unlocking children’s minds than they did in Plato’s time?  It would be a poor lookout if we didn’t, wouldn’t it?  In short, is there a place in every school for a continually updated policy document on teaching and learning that reviews current practices of the school in ‘questioning techniques’.  Is that why increasing numbers of schools - nursery, secondary, primary, special - in the city think there is, and are engaged in producing such documents?

All this forced me to reflect that questioning is a prominent and shared feature of all successful classrooms (whether organised as a whole for individuals or for groups) and learning (whether guided by others or for oneself in classrooms, private study, or practical learning activity).  Questioning is a high level skill.  Some people’s questions scare me rigid even now: I panic and I cannot think.  Whereas others effortlessly, through a mutual trusting relationship, can make me see things I thought beyond my grasp.  It happens still in late middle age.

I came across ‘Questioning’ by Brown and Wragg (yes - Ted!) and more recently ‘Questions, Answers and Feedback in Primary Teaching’ by Karen Mills of the recently established Centre for Research in Elementary and Primary Education at Warwick University.  Both - the latter is accompanied by some taped materials – seem to me a useful addition to any school’s staff development library.  Nor is the new research into questioning confined to the primary sector (though of course it is there that the habits of mind are almost indelibly established or not as the case may be); there is a colleague in Hampshire - Rosemary Tong - who is really good at staff inservice sessions and questioning techniques.  So what are the interesting facts about questioning arising from the Wragg and Mills’ work?  First Wragg’s work confirms Maurice Galton’s of a decade or so earlier that research continues to show that only 8% of questions are related to extending pupils’ learning.  Secondly, Karen Mills in her work sets out some useful definitions of purpose and structure (see below).

Overwhelmingly however their work raised for me some more questions about ‘tone’ and ‘tune’ and returns me to the two teachers I witnessed in Handsworth and East Birmingham.  Both were warm: even incorrect answers were acknowledged positively.  It was as though the teachers were able instantly by divergent thinking to imagine a line of inquiry that had equally interesting possibilities.  “Oh that is a good idea Fazarna, it’s not what I was looking for, but it is much more imaginative“.   “Let’s,” turning to the board, “Put that down so we do not forget it and we will return to it later”.  In short the teachers were prepared to go beyond the right or the wrong and touch affirmingly on effort, attitude and behaviour.  The teachers I saw rarely left the learner in the air by passing on in silence.  I bet both exceeded Wragg’s 49% positive response rate (he classed 20% as neutral and 13% as negative).   Yet it was within clearly established and acknowledged ground rules of expectation.

When it comes to ‘tone’, I know only too well from a Chief Executive I once worked under just how dispiriting even an apparently encouraging question can be rendered by the inflexion of the voice.  He reminded me of no-one so much as my sarcastic French teacher all those years ago.  So how do we account for the unintended impact of different cultural tones in a city with lots of families whose roots are in different parts of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean?  It is a source of much misunderstanding and a barrier to learning.  It is one we must overcome.  We shall only do so by focusing on the ‘how’ of learning and teaching.  Finally, I was reminded of questioning and the role it plays overtly or implicitly in our learning when I looked recently at Successmaker, the IT computer-assisted learning programme that some schools swear by for early Maths and English work.  Like the other favourite and its rival ‘Global’ the scheme is heavily dependent on carefully structured and sequenced implicit or explicit questions - each geared not to diminish but to build the learner’s confidence.

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