10th Anniversary Celebration of the AARs Excellence in Teaching Award.Presentation by the 2006 award winner.Building Questioning Strategies: Or, Why Am I AskingThese Questions And Where Are They Taking Us?Patricia OConnell Killen, Pacic Lutheran UniversityPause and IntroductionRetrieve a time from your own experience as a learner when you rst asked agood question and knew that it was a good question. How were you different afterthat? As a learner? As a thinker? As a human being? What was irrevocably alteredin your moment of shaping, uttering, and owning a good question?Nothing is more powerful for professors and for students than an apt question.Questions give us purchase on material and on our own thinking process. Ques-tions ground and guide us in the process of comprehending, analyzing, criticizing,and creating arguments.While serendipity sometimes bestows the apt question upon us, as with any art,serendipity visits most often those who have practiced. In this case, the practice isbuilding questioning strategies. I am proposing that taking the time to build ques-tioning strategies may be the most practical thing you do as a professor.What is a Questioning Strategy? A carefully sequenced set of questions, designed to advance the learning goalsof a class. Attention to the kinds of questions being asked, their level of dif-culty, the scaling of their sequence, and anticipated possible responses tend tocharacterize well-developed questioning strategies. A questioning strategy contributes to the alignment of students, material, andprofessor that propels toward greater understanding and more incisive engage-ment with material.Why Bother with a Questioning Strategy? To freshen our relationship with the course material; clarify pedagogicaloptions; make more purposeful and pedagogically smart choices; strengthensensibilities for attending to how students interact with material; track thelearning process in a class session more astutely; gain thinking/breathing timein class; move ones own thinking from implicit to explicit. Take advantage of the multiple functions and purposes questions serve: Focus attention on some dimension of subject matter. Function as pivots, building a bridge for the focus of attention from oneobject, idea, or intellectual task to another.IN THE CLASSROOMTeaching Tactics Teaching Tactics 2010 Blackwell Publishing LtdTeaching Theology and Religion, Volume 13, Issue 3, July 2010 251 Open-ended initiating, diagnosis, information-seeking, testing reasoning orpositions, action/application, priority and sequence, prediction, implicationextension, generalization, and more. Avoid spinning your wheels with questions: Do not ask a question to hear yourself talk. Do not mislead your students by asking questions about material you con-sider trivial. Avoid yes or no questions. Phrase questions so that the task is clear. Avoid vague questions. Ask questions about material and issues you consider important. Work from questions that require more concrete thinking to questions thatrequire more analytical, synthetic, and evaluative thinking.Example of a Questioning Strategy: Assess, Sort, Order, Build. This is a strategythat I use in situations where: (a) students have read an important essay or largeamount of material and I want to test their grasp of it; or (b) I want to take thepulse of where the students are in learning the material of a course. I put this chartonto the whiteboard in class (Table 1). Then with students in pairs or triads, I havethem go over the material they have read, discussing it in relation to these fourcategories. After the groups have worked, they ll in the categories on the board.Then we work with it as a whole class to see patterns, points of understanding,confusion, questions, and concerns. I can then help them strengthen their compre-hension and analysis and build on their lacunae in terms of knowledge, analysis,and more.Find Your Own Framework for Questioning Multiple frameworks exist for thinking about questioning. Find a framework and categorization for questions that makes sense for you that works with your pedagogy and material. Draw on fundamental research about questioning: give wait time beforerepeating a question; do not rephrase the question; ask one question at a time,not a string of questions; begin with more concrete questions and move toabstract, complex questions; use a variety of kinds of questions. Write down your questioning strategy and take time after class to think aboutwhether and how it worked.Table 1:This is what I know from the reading;this is how it is signicant; and this ishow it ts with the other materialThis is what I know but I dont knowwhy I should know it (i.e., dont grasprelationships among the parts orsignicance of the material)Questions andConfusionsObjectionsKillen 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 252ResourcesAnderson, L.W. and D.R. Krathwohl, eds. 2001. A Taxonomy for Learning,Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Blooms Taxonomy of EducationalObjectives. New York, N.Y.: Longman.Barkley, Elizabeth F. K., Patricia Cross, and Claire Howell Major. 2005.Collaborative Learning Techniques. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass.Brookeld, Stephen D. 1995. Becoming a Critically Reective Teacher. SanFrancisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass.Brookeld, Stephen D., and Stephen Preskell. 2005. Discussion as a Way ofTeaching. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass.Christensen, C. Roland, David A. Garvin, and Ann Sweet. 1991. Education forJudgment: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership. Boston, Mass.: HarvardBusiness School Press.Eller, Linda and Richard Paul. 2004. The Miniature Guide to the Art of AskingQuestions. Dillon Beach, Calif.: Foundation for Critical Thinking.Finkel, Donald. 2000. Teaching with Your Mouth Shut. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heine-mann.Neff, Rose Ann and Maryellen Weimer. 1989. Classroom Communication:Collected Readings for Effective Discussion and Questioning. Madison, Wis.:Magna.Rotenberg, Robert. 2005. The Art and Craft of College Teaching. Walnut Creek,Calif.: Left Coast Press.Sanders, Norris. 1966. Classroom Questions, What Kind? New York, N.Y.:HarperCollins.Fostaty Young, Sue and Robert J. Wilson. 2000. Assessment and Learning: TheICE Approach. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Portage and Main.Building Questioning Strategies 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 253Copyright of Teaching Theology & Religion is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not becopied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express writtenpermission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.