The session should be delivered by a senior teacher, eg an advanced skills teacher or senior leadership team member responsible for teaching and learning. It may be helpful to involve other staff, who could be called on to offer examples from their own practice.

The CPD leader should make sure they are familiar with the whole of Active Questioning before delivering the session.

The session is designed to last 90 minutes, although it could be shortened if time is tight.

The session is suitable for all teaching and learning staff. The more staff you can involve, the better. It is ideal for all staff as preparation for an Ofsted inspection. However, you may choose to run the session for selected groups of staff over a period of time, eg middle leaders or staff in need of additional support, as highlighted in their performance management review.

It is recommended that the session is delivered to groups of no more than 20 participants at once. A group larger than that makes it harder to form subgroups for discussion and to conduct constructive whole group discussions.

At several points during the session, it is advisable to encourage participants to work with each other in small groups or pairs. It is best if groups contain no more than four participants, and it is worth keeping together staff who teach the same subject. Plan this in advance so that you can allocate participants to a small group before the start of the session.

You will need:

• a flip chart or board and a pen to record participants’ ideas
• presentation graphics software and a projector, in order to show the presentation below.

You will also need copies of the various handouts (see the Resources section for a convenient list).

The session is an ideal opportunity to demonstrate questioning techniques to participants, at the same time as explaining what good questioning involves. Therefore, each task in the session includes a choice, a time frame, a challenge and the requirement for participants to work together. It is worth setting these constraints throughout the session so that participants can experience at first hand what good questioning involves.