Nye - Chapter 7 Reflection

Chapter 7 was a discussion on effective questioning. This is a theme that has been consistently covered in all of the methods classes I have taken. That is not to say that this topic does not bear another look. It stands to reason, as the chapter points out, that “questioning is at the heart of inquiry teaching” (Bass, Carin, & Conant, 2009, p. 204). It would seem to me that effective questioning would be at the heart of good teaching. Of course that has not always been my experience. I remember my grade school fears; that dreaded feeling of hoping that the teacher was not going to call on me. Oh how I hated to hear my name, Virginia what is the answer? It wasn’t because I did not know the answer; I usually did. It was just that I was painfully shy and knowing the answer was social fodder for the bullies again. Just as bad, not knowing would bring scorn academically from my teacher. So there I was left with that sense of impending doom, “please, please, please, not me, don’t call on me” and the sigh of relief when I made it through the gauntlet of that round of grilling! It struck me while reflecting on this chapter that the whole time I spent dreading being called on and asked a question, I was not learning anything. I totally tuned out everything except for the sound of the teacher calling out names. Everything else sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher. The irony is that I was a decent student who was confident with the material. I was just shy and afraid of being put in the spotlight. I wonder what the students who were not so comfortable with the material were going through.
If in the above scenario the teacher would have used strategic questions to engage us, maybe she would not have needed to call on us to get participation. I agree with the authors that effective questioning is like a tool. The type of questions a teacher needs to ask depends on what response they want to elicit. It was interesting to me that in my previous retail management career effective questioning was often a training topic. As far back as the late 1980’s we were being trained to engage customers by asking open-ended questions that would facilitate conversation. The training clinics and seminars spent endless hours on the details of effective questioning. Now here I am, some twenty some odd years later, on a completely different career path. Once again I am learning about the importance of effective questioning. It was just an interesting realization for me, not that it is earth shattering. I feel the bottom line is that effective questioning is essential to good communication overall.