Questioning strategies in Plockton Primary School, Highland

Project summary

This project was the result of a fresh look at assessment in light of the national AifL initiative. There were several reasons behind this, including changes in local authority policy regarding reporting and also the development of ‘programmes of study’ in primary schools. There was also a desire to examine options that could assist in raising standards.

The initial aims of the project were related to classroom assessment and highlighted issues such as feedback and learning intentions. This project subsequently moved well beyond these aims – looking at aspects of course planning, and teacher development – though the focus on questioning strategies remained consistent throughout.

Case study extract

The headteacher’s rationale

Hitherto we taught, we planned, we assessed. We sought to meet pupils’ needs, but AifL seemed to be offering something more. It was saying that the assessment is part of the learning process: it is not just a check-up afterwards, a verification of attainment to allow the planning cycle to move on to the next ‘chunk’ of learning. And it sought to engage the pupils in the actual assessment process. It was asking them to think not just about what they were learning but the learning process itself. 

This is where we found the questioning strategies came in and provided for us the key link as to why new questioning strategies were so important in an initiative that was essentially an assessment initiative. 

We looked at the principal questioning strategies and trialled several of them. We looked at higher- and lower-order questions and open-ended and closed questions. We each went to our classes and lessons and tried consciously to model questioning on these lines. We also told the pupils what we were doing. 

We then looked at think, pair and share. For a while this just seemed like jargon until we unravelled it for ourselves. We found it meant: think about a problem; find out questions to probe it; share and discuss these with other people. 

As we progressed further down into this we started to hit a problem. If a course is structured and maps out coverage it closes down discovery. If one lesson has to end to permit the next in the sequence to begin, then this goes against think, pair and share. 

In one class in science the pupils produced 13 questions discursively as a group. 

• If something is dissolved in water how do we know that it is still in there?
• After dissolving, can we get the stuff back – sugar, salt or other substances dissolved in water?
• Is it always the same? 

They were the pupils’ questions; they did not just happen. To get there the teacher had set the parameters and built up the pupils’ scientific knowledge of properties and materials. They were given an overall goal to investigate dissolving, and were let loose on sugar, water and so on. A lot of questioning (and investigating and answering) had already gone on to get to this point. But out of this came some very high-order questions. A very interesting finding was that the development of skills and scientific method could come about solely through questioning, not questions put by the teacher – however high-order – but questions formed by the pupils. 

These questions did not come from a lesson plan. There was an overall goal but the lesson itself developed. When we discussed this as a staff group, we felt that this was a direct link to experiential and child-centred learning, which we had all encountered, which we all knew of, and which to be honest was a major emphasis at the time of our training. It had never disappeared, but somehow had been overlain by coverage – the ‘curriculum’, its strands, timetabled components, time coverage and all that. 

Evaluation

This project was hard to pin down. We went out and questioned and assessed. We observed questioning and assessing, but a lot of how we made sense of the data, and this report, emerged from staffroom discussion after we tried out new questioning techniques, new forms of assessment, marking, feedback and so on and then discussed the implications. 

A conclusion of our work is that questioning leads to skill development and thus to developing informed attitudes. This last is the most subtle. [In this example] the pupils had developed an informed attitude regarding the scientific method and its application. They were recreating the scientific method for themselves. Our development of questioning strategies was now giving us evidence for that development and our refocus on the ‘Developing informed attitudes’ strand of 5-14 was highlighting it for us. Both were happening at once. 

Next steps

As we tried to make our teaching and learning more formative and sought to make questioning a more sophisticated process we found that the process of questioning itself led to the deepening of skills and developing genuinely informed attitudes. But then we found that we started hopping between curricular areas more and more frequently. In this school we are going to stick our necks out and say that this is absolutely fine. 

In the next stage of this project we are going to undertake whole school work, sampling within a context. We are going to take a particular teaching and learning element, use this as the focus of our development work, look at questioning strategies, discuss learning goals with pupils and then scrutinise the very specific output from this work across the school. We will then examine it – in context. This will assist us in assessing our own teaching strategies and the teaching and learning experience.

Contact details

If you would like further information on this case study, please contact the local authority assessment co-ordinator. You can find contact details for each authority area on our local authority co-ordinators' contacts page.