Questioning Techniques
Your success as a facilitator is in large part dependent upon your ability to actively involve the class in the learning process through thoughtful, provocative, and stimulating questions. Learning, to be interesting, useful, and fun must always be interactive.
Adults learn not by being told, but by experiencing the consequences of their actions. Putting it another way, it is the learner’s response and not just the instructor’s stimulus that determines how successful the learning will be. Questioning plays a key role in how much participants learn (and you learn), and how rewarded everyone feels after the learning experience is over. Unless you plan on giving a speech, sermon, or lecture, the use of questions, active learning, and responding to questions are musts for a successful class. Classroom communication is nothing if not an active, unpredictable process of dialogue.
Also the way questions are structured is key to how conducive an environment is to learning. Asking closed-ended questions that require a “yes-no” or “short, direct answer” cause the adult learner to become disengaged. Open-ended questions that promote critical thinking and exploration is where the emphasis should be.
Types of open-ended questions are provided below:
- Probing →“How you are using SAS with your middle school teachers?”
- Focus Setting → “Now that we reviewed the various tabs for Clear Standards, how do these various options help the users of SAS?”
- Clarifying → “ To help me understand, did you mean that SAS has become a resource for all your school principals? If so, how?”
- Redirecting → “Tom has provided us a few ideas on how best to deliver SAS training, what do the rest of you think?