Posing Purposeful Questions: How our Questioning Patterns Shape Student Outcomes
Michael Wallus
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) recently published Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success For All. The book is designed as a roadmap, laying out the essential practices that contribute to a successful mathematics experience for the students we all serve.
One of the most interesting sections of the book deals with posing purposeful questions. The authors note, “While the types of questions a teacher poses are important, so are the patterns of questions that they use during teacher-student interactions.” The authors go on to identify two distinctly different patterns of questioning: funneling and focusing. How are funneling questions different from focusing questions? Read the analogy below.
Imagine you are learning to drive in a new city.
One way to navigate would be to use a Garmin or Google Maps app and to get from one place to another, attending carefully to the directions as they are read in sequence by the computer without really looking around or identifying landmarks. This approach might get you from point A to point B, however there are potential pitfalls. If your Garmin malfunctions, if you put in an address incorrectly, if you lose your Garmin or if there is a detour, you may experience a great deal of stress and may struggle to find your way because you have not attended to how the network of roads, highways, and streets are connected.
Another way would be to look at a map to get a visual of the street patterns, to look for landmarks to orient yourself as you begin driving or to drive with a local guide who already lives in the city and knows how the freeways, highways, county roads and side streets connect with one another. Eventually, even if you are not driving with your local guide, you begin to build a mental map of the city—you know the connections and relationships between the highways, streets and roads and even if you get lost you can find your way because you understand the system and how to navigate the system. The route you take to any given place is not preset—it will depend on your starting point.
Funneling toward answers is much like learning to drive a new city using only a Garmin. Questioning that pushes a set of steps that get students a correct answer may work in the short-term, however if you remove the teacher, or if the students makes an error, or if the context is unfamiliar, they may struggle to make sense of what to do, what went wrong or how to correct a mistake.
Focusing on relationships is much like learning to drive in a new city by attending to landmarks or driving with a local who knows the roads. Questioning that emphasizes relationships and landmark numbers helps students use the number system to solve problems flexibly. Focusing on relationships also implies that there does not have to be one procedure that students follow to an answer. Just like your location determines the route you take to get to a destination, the strategy students select may depend on the numbers and the context of the problem they are solving.
Another difference in the two situations is that in the context of the Garmin, it gets you efficiently to your destination. A good local guide keeps their focus on WHY you are going where you are going. Are you aiming for speed, a tour of important landmarks, or exploring new places? Each of these reasons WHY would result in a different set of directions.
The goal of a sequence of focusing questions is to keep that idea of WHY an active part of the conversation. It is perfectly valid to want to get someplace quickly and efficiently. In this case your questioning might be akin to taking the highway. Sometimes your answer to WHY might be to learn something new, in which case your trip might take you through a neighborhood you have not explored before. Sometimes the WHY would be to take a friend on a tour to help them understand or share an insight that you have had, in which case the trip might go someplace familiar, but move more slowly and stop occasionally to further explore a place of interest.
I found this description of funneling and focusing patterns to be very significant. It gave a name to patterns I have seen for years as I observed teachers questioning their students. Being able to talk about these patterns using the analogy above helped many of the teachers I have shared it with to begin to examine their own questioning patterns and the implications those patterns have for their students. For a more in-depth look at how one instructional leader engaged teachers in examining their own questioning patterns please click on the link below to an article put forth by learningforward.org.
Michael Wallus is an Elementary Mathematics Coordinator for the Minneapolis Public Schools. He is the current director for MCTM Region 5. michael.wallus@mpls.k12.mn.us
This analogy complements and clarifies the pitfalls of “Asking a series of closed questions” described in ‘Warning Signs’ -article found in Teaching Children Mathematics (Sep 2014, pp. 107-113).
Thank you!