How is questioning a teaching strategy?

I think asking questions is a valid teaching strategy. Questioning allows students to construct their own knowledge through their discovery of the answers. It models how they should form their own questions about the world around them. It encourages them to be curious.

Asking questions allows the student to connect ideas themselves. As the inductive model says, children are natural sorters. Questions often help build concepts and generalizations. Questions can be leading or require the student to come up with a new concept.

Asking questions permits students to link an idea to something in their experience. The question, “How tall does the Goliath sunflower get?” can be answered by “As tall as my brother, standing on top of my shoulders.” This silly answer is wonderfully memorable because it is personal. It links the more scientific question of maximum height to previous knowledge and experience.

Asking questions can stretch the mind. As shown in the Synectics chapter (Joyce, 2015), the practice of thinking of a problem after doing mental warm-ups, the mental warm-ups are questions in terms of metaphors, personal metaphors, and compressed conflicts. This series of instructor-led questions gets the student’s minds ready to think about the topic or problem-of-the-day.

Asking questions leads to scientific inquiry. Asking questions about a picture begins the Picture Word Inductive Model (PWIM). Asking questions is the foundation of the models we have read so far.

Joyce, B., Weil, M., & Calhoun, E. (2015). Models of teaching (9th ed.). New Jersey: Pearson Education.