What Questions Do You Have?

I attended a  colleague-led professional development early in my career on the topic of student engagement. As my co-worker led us in exercises in shifting our “teacher talk” to solicit more student involvement, they suggested that rather than posing the question, “Do you have any questions,” after instructions or portions of the lesson, that we should instead use the phrase, “What questions do you have?”

That simple turn of phrase has become one of the benchmarks of my teaching. Whether I’m with children or adults, I can see the power of “do you” vs. “what.” When I ask people “do you have any questions,” their default answer is often no, regardless of whether that is true. Students of all ages often look around the room at that question, and begin to wonder if having questions is acceptable. Rather than seeing the wheels turning, I see shut down. 

When we change the language to “what questions do you have,” and the expectation is set that THERE WILL BE QUESTIONS, the difference is palpable. People lean in. They review their notes. They start thinking, and spend less time looking to others for guidance on how to respond.  As the instructor, I’m showing my humanity and vulnerability, which is a touchstone of identity safe classrooms,  and I’m inviting my students to do the same. In that small phrase, I’m telling my students that I’m not always clear in my instructions. I make mistakes. I’m slowing down. I’m showing them that learning is communal and collaborative and that this is the time in the lesson for THEM to process. 

This fall, as I teach undergraduates in a mostly asynchronous online course, I have only 1 hour of facetime. We are on Zoom. Zoom certainly has some tools for facilitating discussion, but we’re all new at it, and my students have varying degrees of comfort in talking in that forum. So, I’m holding close some of my strategies for teacher talk as a means to create identity safety, and watching how they translate to the virtual classroom. This trick from a Friday PD 10 years ago brought us from almost silence to conversation, gave us some laughs, and created a lot of reassurance that while class looks very different this year, our vulnerability and humanity can guide us towards learning all the same. 

What questions do you have?

What linguistic tricks do you use in the classroom? 

How are you collaborating with vulnerability? 

Classroom language liberates.