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Questioning skills

Teacher helping pupil

"Good learning starts with questions, not answers."
Guy Claxton, Professor in Education and Director of CLIO Development University of Bristol

Questioning enables teachers to check learners' understanding. It also benefits learners as it encourages engagement and focuses their thinking on key concepts and ideas.

This questioning needs to inspire gifted and talented learners to embrace cognitive thought at a higher level and is easier to achieve when using open questions. These questions are often arranged according to their level of complexity; this is called taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy is one approach that can be used to help plan and formulate higher order questions.

This type of questioning also actively encourages the development of thinking and dialogue skills.