Lollipop Questions
Don’t forget the Questioning sticks!
I’m a big believer in keeping good resources to hand so that you’ll remember to use them more often!
So a resource I made some time ago has been given a new home on my window beside my desk to remind me to use them much more often in lessons.
Lollipops in class
My Lollipop Question sticks are designed to promote better questioning in lessons.
Questions are key to all aspects of Good and Outstanding learning, from asking “How?” to asking the bigger “What if?” or “How could you…”.
learners have to be guided towards developing their questioning skills
As with many things learners have to be guided towards developing their questioning skills, it’s one thing for the teacher to ask good probing questions (and you must do that every lesson) but its even more powerful when learners themselves can ask questions with equal range of complexity.
Check out this awesomely useful Bloom’s Taxonomy for questioning sheet to help you make your own! (click for PDF)
My lollipop sticks
My lollipop sticks have the category of question on one side of them, and then the starting point of a question on the other, acting as a prompt for learners to develop their own questions.
- Knowledge
- Comprehension
- Application
- Analysis
- Evaluation/Synthesis
Activity idea
Create your own homework
Towards the close of a lesson I hand two or more sticks to each student (depending on my own wish to differentiate) The students are then given a similar number of Post-it notes and asked to come up with questions inspired by the sticks based on the topic we’ve covered.
These are then stuck to the wall by students.
As they begin to leave the class, one by one, I pick at random question Post-it notes from the wall and hand them out as homework challenges to the students!
