questioning

The very first questioning technique I tried was asking the students a higher level question, having them jot down an answer, and then calling on them to hear what they were thinking.  This one appealed to me right away because when I was in school I always wanted to participate in class, but didn't like the feeling of sharing an answer before I could think it through.  By the time I could work up the confidence to raise my hand, the teacher would have already moved on or called on someone else.  I thought that if I (a relatively involved, if not slightly nerdy student) felt this way, surely there must be at least one other person out there with the same issues.  I carefully prepared a question ahead of time and when the right point in the lesson came, I told the students that I would ask them a question and I wanted them to write down the answer (while emphasizing that I would not be collecting it and that any idea is valid).  The students looking only slightly confused when I asked the question and then, when I urged them to write, most of them came up with surprisingly well thought out answers.  I liked that I was completely justified in calling on all students to share their answers since they all had something written down.  I learned from this that, although some students may have a hard time instantly parroting back information, they are more than capable of thinking and trying to make sense of the material. 

During my first evaluation I was told that I should vary my questioning (not just doing it all by volunteer - which is hard when you have good students who are so willing to volunteer).   I wasn't comfortable doing this at first because I know how much I hate being called on to ask a question I don't really know the answer to when the kid next to me gets called on to answer "my question" (the thing I had the perfect answer for).  But, from the teacher's standpoint, I realize that if you only ever hear from the kids who know they know the answer, you're not getting a correct assessment of the class's knowledge.  Today I used the cold calling technique where I had all of the student's names on cards and drew them at random in a long series of fast paced questioning.  I think this would have struck more fear into the hearts of the students if there were more than four students and they didn't go into the class knowing they were going to have to answer 25% of the questions asked all day.  I worried that this wouldn't go smoothly because the kids in my class like volunteering so much (even if just to ask us to rephrase the question).  However, they did great!  It only took one question before they realized that putting their hands up wasn't going to get them called on any faster.  None of them ever yelled out an answer (even the painfully easy answers), that really surprised me.  One thing that I noticed was that I had to stop and reshuffle the deck every couple minutes because with only four names (20% of our class was absent today) it started getting really obvious whose name was up next, thus taking the surprise out of the whole thing.

Basically, I was really happy with how both of the techniques turned out.  I think that they will both work out well in a full sized class too, and that is what really makes me happy.