Pedagogy Postcard #1: Dialogic Questions

March 22, 2014 by Tim Taylor Leave a comment

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A series of short posts about specific elements of teaching practice that are I think are effective and make life interesting. Some are based on my own lessons and others are borrowed from lessons I’ve observed.

There are lots of ways of asking questions.  Previously I’ve written about:

Probing Questions: http://headguruteacher.com/2013/01/22/great-lessons-1-probing-questions/

Think-Pair-Share: http://headguruteacher.com/2012/07/17/the-washing-hands-of-learning-think-pair-share/

And there are lots of great posts out there about questioning, like this from Alex Quigley: http://www.huntingenglish.com/2012/11/10/questioning-top-ten-strategies/

It’s a natural, sensible tendency for teachers to want to spread questions around a class, involving as many students as possible, keeping them all interested, listening to each other and thinking about the question in hand.  However, recently, I’ve been trying to explore what happens when you focus more intensively on just one student to probe more deeply into a set of ideas.  This approach is based on the idea of dialogic teaching that colleagues at KEGS have explored in…

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