Teaching teachers to question questions

Abstract

Educators and researchers generally agree that developing knowledge about and competence in questioning techniques is an important goal of preservice teacher education. The authors found that explaining various questioning paradigms through a lecture‐discussion method was completely inadequate for achieving this aim: it resulted in confusion and was ineffective in changing students’ questioning behaviors.

In this paper the authors discuss the problem and describe steps they have taken to aid understanding and to influence students’ questioning behaviors positively. They propose using two contrasting paradigms for developing and analyzing questions for use with difficult texts and for different purposes. Moreover, the authors suggest that for training to be effective preservice teachers need a variety of in‐depth experiences in constructing and analyzing questions with practice and feedback provided over time.