In an earlier post on Five Characteristics of Great Blended Learning Teachers, I wrote about giving up control and asking open-ended questions. Together, these present hard challenges for some educators used to being the purveyor of all wisdom and information. We are trained to ask content-specific questions rather than probes designed to help the student own their own work. If we take lessons from the training and development world, and think about the very best professional development sessions we've attended, we quickly see that targeted probes help us efficiently empower the students while also building a stronger teacher-student relationship.

You probably have your own set of "go-to" questions. Here's mine, along with the rationale as to why I have found that question to be an important part of my toolset.

1. What did the instructions say to do?

   Who reads instructions, right? This critical question saved many a frustrated student when I was working with a system that had required audio but no transcript. If I asked this question, I quickly learned not only if the student was paying attention, but also whether or not they were even listening to the audio. Many times their response was something along the lines of "I didn’t remember there was audio?"

2. What is the question really asking?

   Sometimes the students know the content, but the wording of the question or task confuses them. This question gets them to focus first on understanding the question instead of getting to an answer. It also helps me quickly identify gaps in literacy and test taking skills to address in small group or individual instruction.

3. Which answers can you eliminate?

   Usually question 2 above goes hand-in-hand with this one. Here, I listen for the student's confidence level related to eliminating some of the answer choices. The answers give me cues as to retention of basic, supporting information as well as to deeper processing.

4. What have you checked?

   This is my go-to question when students (and other educators) cannot get into the system, see their assignments, or are having some other issue with access. Experience tells me that nine times out of 10 – it is user error. I’ve been that user with the error – I know. No matter how astute or savvy our students and staff say they are, there will always be the need to asked this question, especially in relation to checking the URL, username, password, etc. Keep them focused on going through the trouble-shooting steps before they raise their hands or send you another email.

5. Talk to me about what you’re working on. What is this lesson/module about?

   Even when the student is working on learning concepts at the remember level, imitating the process of, say simple addition, I want to know if they can easily tell me about what they’re working on. Asking this question in lots of different ways, gets them used to my probes and helps them stay focused.

6. How’s you progress on XYZ goal coming?

   Joint goal setting between the teacher and the student emerges as a wonderful outcome from high-quality, blended learning. Working together to set reasonable, achievable, short-term sets for the students gives us a question that becomes the "check-in" question. Often times, it sparks other conversation about how to reach the goal earlier or remove a roadblock.

7. What other ways could you prove that you know ABC?

   Yes, personalizing teaching and learning takes more initial preparation time. But, I like to think of it as meeting the student where they are, finding what they need, and then helping them get there. Involving them in the conversation about proving what they’ve learned involves them in the process of learning. This requires that I be comfortable "thinking on my feet," listening in detail, and helping the student to adjust their response so that it matches the objective at hand.

8. What do you think will happen if we do X? Or, if we do Y?

   Personalizing instruction gives me limitless opportunities to challenge learners whether they are professional development participants or students. Asking about outcomes helps me check on processing and problem-solving skills. This set of questions may also help me identify potential peer-leaders for small group work.

9. Let's break it down. First step is what? And then afterwards – what next?

   This is another process question. It goes along with question 10 below. By helping students to break down tasks and put them in logical order, I'm helping them to apply what they’ve just learned. I try to let them teach me. After all, I learned more subject matter content when I had to teach it and explain it to students than I did when I sat in my college classes.

10. Remember that we’re focused on XYZ and doing it with precision. What are you thinking about as you go through the problem?

    One part of quality instruction that uses the cognitive domain in conjunction with the affective and psychomotor domains is helping the students to realize what they are thinking about as they are doing the work. Get them to focus on their own mental power and understanding. Asking this question as a part of the dialogue gives me a ton more information than just having them regurgitate or list out a process or set of steps.

11. What do your notes say about that?

    Simple? Absolutely. But, I can't begin to count the number of times that I've been observing in classrooms or blended learning environments where teachers have not talked with their students about notes or study aids. We need to work together with the student to set the expectation, and then used probes like this to monitor the expectation. We also need to do more than check to make sure the student took notes. I look at the types of notes taken and connect them to what I already know about how that student learns best, gently suggesting ways to adjust their individual process.