Questioning as a Reflective Tool
Two question banks
Backward-looking questions
- How much did you know about the subject before?
- What process did you use to plan?
- How have you become better at teaching this year?
- Where do you still need to improve?
- What problems came up while teaching?
- What parts of the lesson did you enjoy or dislike, and why?
- What beliefs were behind your teaching choices?
- Did your goals for the lesson change as you taught?
Outward-looking questions
- Did you teach the way other people teach?
- Where did you do it differently?
- If you were the head of department, what would you say about your teaching?
- What grade would you give it, and why?
- What would you change if you could teach it again?
- What would you advise a new teacher to do?
When to use which
Backward-looking questions surface causes. Outward-looking questions widen perspective. A reflection that uses both becomes harder to bias.
A teacher who asks the right question gets a useful answer. A teacher who asks no question gets a vague feeling. The difference between drifting reflection and reflection that produces change usually sits at the question level.
Two banks of questions help. One looks back at the lesson just taught. The other looks outward, at how the lesson compares to what other teachers do.
Backward-looking questions
These questions investigate what actually happened. They turn over the planning, the delivery, and the teacher’s own state of mind.
Questions about what you knew
How much did you know about the subject before you started planning? A teacher who is still learning a topic teaches it differently from one who has taught it ten times. Naming the gap helps explain why some explanations were rough.
Questions about planning
What process did you go through to plan the lesson? Did you use a template, copy from last year, or build it fresh? Have you done a similar kind of work before? A teacher who skips planning and runs on instinct will get instinct-shaped results.
Questions about your growth
In what ways have you become better at teaching this term? In what ways do you still need to improve? Both questions matter. The first one stops self-criticism from becoming the only voice. The second one stops complacency.
Questions about problems
What problems came up while you were teaching the lesson? Was it timing, materials, an interruption, a confused explanation, or a student response you did not expect? A specific problem is the door into a useful reflection. “Things did not go well” is not.
Questions about your feelings
How do you feel about the lesson? What parts did you particularly like or dislike, and why? What did you enjoy? Feelings are data. A lesson that left you energised and one that left you drained are not the same lesson, even if the plan was the same.
Questions about beliefs and goals
What were your beliefs that informed the teaching choices? Did you meet your standards? What were your goals for the lesson, and did the goals change as you taught? A teacher who has no answer to “what was I trying to do” cannot tell whether the lesson worked.
Outward-looking questions
These questions step out of the teacher’s own head. They place the lesson next to what other people do, what an outside observer would say, and what a more experienced version of the teacher might recommend.
Comparison with others
Did you teach in the way other people teach? In what ways did you do it differently? In what ways was your approach similar? A teacher who cannot answer these questions is teaching in isolation.
The manager view
If you were the head of department or a manager, what comments would you make about your own teaching? What grade would you give it, and why? Stepping into the manager’s chair removes some of the self-protection that pure first-person reflection allows.
The replay question
What would you change if you had a chance to teach the lesson over again? What will you change in the next lesson? This pair forces the reflection to commit to action. Without it, the reflection ends as a paragraph and changes nothing.
The advice question
What would you advise a new teacher to do, given what you have just learned? This question is unusually useful because giving advice tends to crystallise what you actually know. A teacher who cannot give clear advice may not have a clear lesson yet.
Backward-looking surfaces causes; outward-looking widens perspective
Backward-looking questions ask what happened and why. Outward-looking questions step into another person’s view. Used together they prevent the reflection from staying inside the teacher’s own story, which is the place where blind spots live.
A worked example
Consider a teacher who has just taught a unit on photosynthesis to grade 8. A typical drift-reflection ends, “the lesson was difficult, students did not engage.”
A reflection driven by these questions reads differently:
The teacher had taught photosynthesis twice before but had not refreshed the diagram. Planning copied last term’s structure without checking whether students had the prerequisite vocabulary. The biggest problem was that students did not know the word “molecule” and stopped following after slide three. The teacher felt frustrated. The goal was for students to explain the process in their own words. The goal was not met. A different colleague always starts the topic with a leaf in their hand, which the teacher had not done. If the lesson were taught again, the teacher would start with the leaf and pause to teach “molecule” before slide three. Advice to a new teacher: check vocabulary before relying on a diagram.
This is the same lesson described twice. The second version produces a plan for the next lesson. The first version produces nothing.
When the questions stop working
A question bank only helps if the teacher answers honestly. A bank used to produce socially acceptable answers becomes a worksheet. The way to keep the questions useful is to share some of them, sometimes, with a critical friend. Other people notice when an answer is too tidy.