Empowering Students Through Questioning

Teachers ask 40 questions a day. Do the questions empower students, assess student knowledge of the subject matter, or promote student metacognition? Empowering Students Through Questioning: A Guide for Understanding the Skills in Lesson Design and Instruction addresses the art and skill of questioning so teachers can plan more effective lessons and achieve greater student engagement and cognition. Included are practice activities for teachers to use in planning questions for their lesson, as well as field tested rubrics to help coach and mentor teachers in understanding how their questions address student activity. The book also discusses common pitfalls of questioning, what type of test is best to use to assess student knowledge, activities for planning and assessing questioning, types of assessments to use, and the types of questions that are most effective for the specific assessment. The relationship between Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (teacher input) and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (student output) is also shown so teachers can see the impact of their questioning.

As an elementary school teacher, Dr. Mario C. Barbiere’s book, Empowering Students Through Questioning: A Guide for Understanding the Skills in Lesson Design and Instruction, has been an extremely useful and informative text. Each chapter offers something enlightening that can be used in everyday planning, differentiating, and instructing for students of all ages and abilities. Additionally, this book has been a helpful tool that myself and colleagues have utilized during Professional Learning Communities., Dr. Barbiere was a professor of mine during my undergraduate studies, and I was fortunate enough to reconnect with him during my graduate studies. His passion for education knows no bounds and he continues to move forward in a progressive style that is second to none. By encouraging teachers to act as facilitators to student-guided instruction and questioning, students are exposed to a higher educational plane that fosters true learning. Barbiere’s methods are practical and innovative, and I can see his methodology offering students their greatest opportunities for success., As a former mentee and employee of Dr. Barbiere, I have witnessed the impact that effective questioning practices have on a multitude of student learners. These types of techniques have been successful in various school settings, grade levels, and student ability levels. What’s unique about Dr. Barbiere’s approach is that through higher order questioning, students gain the necessary skills to build confidence and think critically resulting in self-regulated learning. As a school administrator, I have coached many staff members and have seen a significant change in students’ ability to overcome challenges on their own using many of Dr. Barbiere’s techniques. I am fully confident that proper implementation of these techniques can yield positive effects on student learning within your classroom and/or school district as it has done in mine.

A passionate practitioner with a strong theoretical background, Dr. Mario C. Barbiere was a teacher, school administrator, superintendent, professor, and school turnaround educator committed to positive student academic success and closing the achievement gap. He has worked at both the district and state level for school turnaround promoting student self-regulation and teacher empowerment.