Case study
This case study shows how the Year 5 and Year 6 teams at a primary school in England made effective use of Active Questioning approaches in order to improve pupils’ thinking and literacy standards.
Teachers devised very precise questioning tactics in order to obtain the results they wanted. They were also very persistent and explicitly promoted the use of props including thesauruses, dictionaries and the connectives menu.
At no point did teachers follow any dogma. They carefully worked out what was best for their classes in order to achieve higher quality spoken and written English. When questions were asked, teachers often modelled the sorts of answers that could be acceptable. However, they never gave an answer away! Likewise, when pupils were given the time to think and prepare answers, they were sometimes encouraged to work ideas through on paper. Time was extended to support this. All these approaches improved the quality of pupils’ responses.
Finally, teachers devoted huge effort to the development of fluency in spoken English. There was a painstaking approach to making sure different ways of structuring answers were explained properly. Pupils developed a full repertoire of connectives and a higher range of vocabulary as a result.
The results have been very positive in terms of developing higher standards of spoken and written English, which lay at the heart of what the school needed to achieve.