Empowering Students Through Questioning: A Guide for Understanding the Skills in Lesson Design and Instruction

Teachers ask 40 questions a day. Do the questions empower students, assess student knowledge of the subject matter, or promote student metacognition? Empowering Students Through Questioning: A Guide for Understanding the Skills in Lesson Design and Instruction addresses the art and skill of questioning so teachers can plan more effective lessons and achieve greater student engagement and cognition. Included are practice activities for teachers to use in planning questions for their lesson, as well as field tested rubrics to help coach and mentor teachers in understanding how their questions address student activity. The book also discusses common pitfalls of questioning, what type of test is best to use to assess student knowledge, activities for planning and assessing questioning, types of assessments to use, and the types of questions that are most effective for the specific assessment. The relationship between Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (teacher input) and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (student output) is also shown so teachers can see the impact of their questioning.

A passionate practitioner with a strong theoretical background, Dr. Mario C. Barbiere was a teacher, school administrator, superintendent, professor, and school turnaround educator committed to positive student academic success and closing the achievement gap. He has worked at both the district and state level for school turnaround promoting student self-regulation and teacher empowerment.