How to Get Your Students to Answer Questions in Class
So we’ve learned by now that students can only be engaged during a lecture for maybe 20 minutes at a time. Therefore it’s important to break up your lecture and include some student engagement.
The easiest way to do this is to stop the lecture and ask your students verbal questions like:
What’s the next step?
Any ideas on how we should approach this problem?
Does this idea look familiar?
However, a lot of the time, your students will respond with blank stares. This just happened to me on the first day of class. Maybe it was too early in the morning. Maybe they were intimidated by the math. It doesn’t matter what there issue was, I still found a way to get them to answer my questions. Because, like I told my students, I don’t want to stand up and talk for a full 50 minutes by myself! They need to be involved too!
I’ve come up with 4 tips on how to get your students to answer questions in class.
Make your expectations clear on the first day of class
It’s important to set the tone on the first day of class. If you expect your students to answer your questions throughout the semester, you must ask them questions on the first day.
It doesn’t even have to be deep or related to the subject of the class at all. Start with low stakes questions. Let them ask questions about the syllabus. Ask them about their previous classes from the same subject. You can even ask what their major is. I’ve made a list of questions that you can ask your students on the first day of classes.
Download the Icebreaker Questions!
I like to start with an icebreaker activity to get them up and out of their seats to meet each other. I go more in-depth about this icebreaker in my free e-course about implementing group work as a graduate student.
After setting the foundation of some type of exchange between you and your students, they will have meet me and each other (if you tried my icebreaker) and loosened up a bit. Now you can ask them any question and they will be less nervous to answer.
Answer every question seriously
It may be annoying to repeat something that you’ve already explained. But sometimes students miss it. Maybe they were writing notes or maybe they just spaced out. But for some reason they missed it.
When this happens, you should answer the question fully and make sure that your students understand.
This shows that you care about them and want to help them as much as you can. It also shows that you won’t embarrass your students if they answer something incorrectly.
Students really appreciate that! It has been mentioned many times in my teacher evaluations that I never make my students feel bad for asking questions and that they can tell that I care about them learning.
Remember, teaching evaluations can be a big part of your job applications if you want a job in academia.
Embrace the awkward silence
Because it will happen. You will ask a question and no one will answer. When this happens, the best thing you can do is wait. And after a significant amount of time has passed (30-45 seconds), if you can tell that they do not know the answer, prompt them.
Ask them a leading question. You know, one that will lead them to the correct answer without giving it away. A question that will put them on the right train of thought.
When you ask leading questions, you are training your students to think that way so that they can get themselves to answers to a question (when they are working alone) and don’t know where to begin.
Here’s what happened to me on the first day of my precalculus class, even after we had such a great time getting to know each other:
We were learning about the distance formula and started to work this problem.
Find the set of all points that are 4 units away from the point (2, -3).
I plotted the point on a graph so that they could get a visual. Then I asked, “any ideas on how to get started?”
Silence.
So I asked, “can anyone find one point 4 units away?”
Silence.
So then I chose a random point at least 10 units away and asked, “is this 4 units away?”
Finally, a few people said no. And then someone said we could add and subtract 4 units from the x and y coordinate.
And then we were well on our way to getting to the answer to that problem.
After we went through all of that my students realized that I would not accept silence as an answer to any of my questions.
Call on students
I don’t really like to put students on the spot to answer questions, especially in a lower level math course because people have real anxieties about math and I don’t want to traumatize them; I want them to love it as much as I do. At least that’s the goal.
Also, being called on is something I hated as a student and it gave me anxiety!
I like to call on students to ask them how they feel:
“How do you feel about this topic?”
“Do we need more practice?”
“Which part is the most difficult?”
“If you were working this on you own, where would you have gotten stuck?”
That last one is my favorite. It really makes the students look back at the problem to make sure they really understand it.
Extra Tips
Along with those 4 tips, I wanted to give you a few other small things you can do to get your students to answer your questions.
Smile
Look like a nice, approachable person.
Be relatable and tell them about when you learned the topic.
I hope that you enjoyed this post. Let me know which tips you plan to use in your classroom and please share any other tips you may have in the comments section below. It could really help other grad students struggling with getting their students to answer their questions.
