Ask, Don't Tell: Powerful Questioning in the Classroom, Paperback

Artful questioning may be the most powerful tool a teacher has in her instructional toolkit to manage the class, engage students with the subject matter, encourage dialogue, and deepen understanding. Educators are encouraged to break the pattern of low-level daily procedural questioning and instead focus powerful questions that increase student engagement and insure their mastery of content and skills. Powerful questioning may engender deep, diverse, creative, and metacognitive thinking. The authors, all with extensive teaching experience, describe powerful questioning in English Language Arts, Mathematics, History and Social Studies, and Science through both exposition and narration and using vignettes of teacher practice. Their focus is on those moments when teachers and students are engaged in classroom questioning tasks that involve face-to-face interactions and oral discourse, which comprise the great majority of time spent in schools.

About author(s):Angela Peery has been a Teacher Specialist with the South Carolina Department of Education and worked with a chronically low-performing middle school as part of a turnaround team. Angela was also previously a consultant for the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, co-teaching and designing lessons with teachers in high-poverty, at-risk schools in Seattle and Indianapolis. She lives in Beaufort, South Carolina. Polly Patrick has been involved in the Instructional Leadership Team and the Grading and Reporting Committee that have been at the core of creating a learning culture at Minnetonka High School. Polly has traveled to multiple districts and national conferences promoting the value of creating grading systems that give an accurate reflection of what students know and can do. She lives in Salem, Virginia. Deb Moore is a clinical faculty member teaching elementary mathematics courses to preservice teachers and serves as a coach to a small cohort of her students with a mathematics emphasis as they complete their field work and student teaching in urban elementary classrooms throughout Baltimore and Washington D.C.