Questions¶
Let’s take a look at one of your most important teaching tools: Questions. Questions play a key role in teaching. They make your students think, allowing you to guide their thoughts. They also tell you what students are thinking about, providing you immediate feedback that you need to adjust the speed of a lesson.
Question types¶
Let’s take a look what type of questions you could ask:
1. Fact-based questions¶
“Which software is most commonly used for creating spreadsheets?”
answer is right or wrong
dangerous (not stimulating up to intimidating)
work better during recap sessions
leaves you with the problem what you do if the students cannot answer them
2. Opinion-based questions¶
“What is your opinion on Excel?”
safe
everybody can answer them
reduce anxiety
answers may lack substance
is a ‘temperature check’
3. Comparison-based questions¶
“How would you compare Excel and OpenOffice?”
more substance
complex
encourage discussion
4. Experience-based questions¶
“What have you done with Excel so far?”
safe
connect course contents to the real world
motivating
this is a good priming question
5. Case-history-based questions¶
“You have a table containing 1000 rows and 5 columns. You need to show the most frequently occurring elements for each column. How can you show this information in one diagram?”
very complex
needs preparation
answer requires application of skills
students may need time to think
this is a good type of question to be worked on in pairs or groups
6. Questions guided at single participants¶
“James, can you name a few functions in Excel please?”
very risky and discouraging. Don’t do it!
work better if presented as a round of questions to everybody, quiz etc.
if you need to assign questions to single participants, use a random mechanism.
if you ask a question, tell the name at the end, so that the other participants will think, too.
7. Overhead question¶
“Can anyone name an Excel function?”
question is directed to everybody
not very risky
asymmetric participation is typical
8. Relay question¶
pass the same question around from one person to the other
good to involve everybody
gets boring with more than 10 participants
9. Reverse technique¶
“Is Windows or Linux better?” – “What would you say?”
participant asks the question
you redirect the question back to the trainee or relay to the group.
10. Rhetorical questions¶
“What is the Big-O-notation? Let’s take a look at the definition”
you ask a question.
after a short pause, you answer the question yourself.
this is a trick to focus attention. You can use it to emphasize that an important fact is coming.
When to ask questions?¶
One key function of questions is to make sure your participants stay on board. When introducing complex subjects like programming, it is wise to pause after every concept (roughly every 5 minutes) and ask a question. Sometimes you might get away with the straightforward
:::text
Are there any questions?
But this is not a very effective one, because it fizzles out quite often. A better question would be to pick up a simple fact from the previous block:
:::text
Why do we have to write an equal sign when adding two cells in Excel?
(e.g. '=A1+B1')
This type of question works great in live coding sessions.
You can try the (wrong) input A1+B1 to illustrate a students’ answer.
A more challenging question, also for live coding would be:
:::text
Is this going to work? ('A1+B1')
In a more presentation-like setting, you can use questions to connect to previous knowledge. My favourites are:
:::text
What does this line do?
How is the tuple different from a list?
How would you implement this in SQL?
What happens if we unindent this line?
Most questions that are interspersed with new content should be easy fact-based questions. In you can build a sequence of such question as a “handrail” through the lesson. If things go well, the students will start asking their own questions soon. Some of the best teaching I witnessed was more of a dialogue than anything like a lecture.
The warm-up and wrap-up parts of a lesson are natural places to ask questions. Usually, you need to prepare them, although it does not take long. Pick any of the more interesting types from the list above.
The question types are inspired by: Jolles. How to run seminars and workshops