Nursery World - Learning & Development: Questioning and explaining

Ask yourself how you ask questions, and how you handle children's responses - are they learning anything? Helen Bilton explains.

The greatest confusion to children is caused by a lack of precision in teacher's questions during explanation, according to Wragg and Brown (see references, p18). In other words, the moment practitioners open their mouths, they confuse children.

This is worrying, because we are supposed to be the experts at helping children to develop their understanding. Why does this happen? Because practitioners tend to say they will ask questions about a particular topic, but don't then spend time working out what those questions are and how they will aid children's learning.

It's important that we spend time thinking what learning we want and how the questions will help us to get there. Take the following two questions:

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