One of the main ways in which teachers ‘give’ feedback to pupils is through follow-up questioning. This is sometimes the case in written feedback, but is particularly the case in oral feedback, as part of dynamic classroom teaching, in which feedback is folded into learning and is indistinguishable from the discussion and exploration of ideas. It is one key way in which teachers insist on deeper thinking.*1 In English, it is one of the key ways in which we push analysis and explore response.
Questions to ask pupils when reading, based on Michael Rosen’s ‘matrix’ of comments
Michael Rosen recently published a ‘matrix’ of different types of comments which children make about the texts they are reading:
I have had a go at composing typical ‘trigger questions’ for each type of comment, for use in training.
Click here or on the image above to download the questions as a Word document.
Folding feedback into learning
Number #2 in an occasional series of short posts on feedback, appearing in no particular order
Last year, I visited a lesson in which pupils were analysing a newspaper article. They read the article as a class, then – in pairs, so that they were having to articulate their ideas before committing them to paper – they wrote answers to a set of questions. The level of analysis and of expression was variable but, on the whole, not very high:
‘The purpose of the article is to tell about what happened.’
‘The headline really grabs the reader’s attention’
James Durran 