Rhetorical or Meaningful; Are We Just Talking to be Heard?

We have all had that experience of knowing someone, whether it be in our personal or professional lives, who seems to talk and ask questions just to be heard. As educators, we should strive to make the direct questions we ask of our students effective and meaningful. There is great value in the use of open-ended questions where students are asked to dig deep and make their own connections to the topic at hand, however now I would like to consider strategies used to as effective and direct questions of your class. In their Literacy and Numeracy initiative, the Ontario Ministry of Education, published the Asking Effective Questions in Mathematics which can be accessed through the EduGAINS site.  A number of helpful guides to higher level question-asking for the Math classroom are featured and one example of such is pictured below:

Posing such questions allows for the students to make connections and allows them to make inferences and draw conclusions based on their observations and their reasoning skills. The use of prompts provides the opportunity for the teacher to give the student the floor to use their own voices to work out a problem verbally, justify and support their thought process, and essentially, to think out loud. If we want to welcome literacy into the Math classroom a great start would be to keep encouraging our students by leading them in a way that they become comfortable thinking out loud.