Substitute Teachers Lounge
Substitute Teachers Lounge
Which Students Should Substitute Teachers Ask Questions First?
This episode delves into the art of asking questions in the classroom, emphasizing the balance between engaging students and avoiding embarrassment. We discuss various interactive techniques and approaches to make questioning enjoyable and effective for both teachers and students.
• Importance of asking questions in promoting interaction
• Strategies for creating a fun questioning environment
• Using games and creative methods to engage students
• Encouraging student participation through teamwork
• Avoiding embarrassment while fostering confidence
• Tailoring questioning techniques to different student personalities
• Leaving students with a sense of accomplishment and eagerness to learn
Greg Collins. Substitute Teachers Lounge. It's episode 277. You know, every time I do an episode, I'm thinking man, 277 episodes. Is there really anything left to talk about? Well, there is.
Greg:I thought of something this week as I was teaching. Really, I've been formulating it since we got back after the holidays. Today we're going to talk about it's going to have a little bit to do with interacting with students and how to do that. It's going to have, more specifically, to do with asking students questions. Who do you ask? How do you ask? How do you make it fun when you ask? How do you keep from embarrassing students when you ask Do you care if you embarrass students when you ask? Let's talk about that.
Greg:Substitute teachers loud, all right, guys, it is February 2025, man, here we go again. The calendar moves by so fast. I will tell you this. My wife and I, about a week ago, got back from a cruise. We heard a comedian on the cruise and he was the one that actually pushed me over the top to get this episode done, because he had a joke about a teacher who asked a student a question and he was very reluctant to answer. And I can't repeat the joke because this is a family podcast, but it gave me the idea. Well, you know how do we approach students when we ask them things. Does that even serve as an icebreaker? Can we use it as an icebreaker? How do we make it fun? I'm going to share with you the tools I've seen in various different classrooms that I kind of really enjoyed. I'll share with you how to keep it from being embarrassing.
Greg:Now, in some of your personalities you kind of want to embarrass students. Embarrassing. Now, in some of your own personalities you kind of want to embarrass students. Sometimes I don't really do that. I do it with sarcasm. Sometimes I might say how we had an infestation of rabbits under our house and when one of the students says you did, I'd say no, I was just kidding. I'll embarrass them that way, but I won't ask them a question for the purpose of embarrassing them or even for that. Now, the teachers will do this. I won't do this as a substitute teacher. I won't ask a question of a student just because I've got a pretty good hunch that he doesn't know the answer. So I want to put pressure on him to know the answer. Now, there's positives to that. You could say well, the more you ask this student question and the more they realize they're going to get called out in class for not knowing the answer. Well, maybe they'll take it upon themselves to study more. Be prepared for class Flip side. You've also got students that will answer every question.
Greg:I subbed a fifth grade class. You know it's funny. I hadn't really talked that much to my next door neighbor's family. I know them well, used to work with the father. My wife knows the mother real well. I had one of them in. I had the son in my fifth grade class and man, he was one of those that would raise his hand to every question and I told him. I said now I don't want him to be the only one answering questions, so the rest of you show me too. They were just going to let him to answer them all. I made sure that afternoon I saw him outside. The father and son are both out there were just going to let him to answer them all. I made sure that afternoon I saw him outside. The father and son are both out there. I make sure that I went over and bragged about that student because I really enjoy those kind of students. I enjoy all the students.
Greg:But let's talk today about how we can handle this, how we can make this a fun process. Okay, so if I've got questions to ask, let's first talk about if questions were left to ask by the regular teacher. How do you choose to ask them? Now I'll throw this out there. I'm still a Jolly Rancher guy because they're so cheap. I just got a five-pound bag and I think it cost me less than I don't know $8 or something like that, and we'd give them out at our church. We'd give them out at our schools when we go substitute teach. It's just kind of a fun thing, it's a reward thing. I'll get into trivia game that I played this last week too, because I had about 10 minutes to kill in a class and we used them for that too. But more importantly, the questions that are important for the class. You could just in fact this for the benefit of the students. This is the one they probably prefer.
Greg:I'm thinking of those times back in, even when I was in school where you know, maybe you were you had to do a paper for homework and everybody was supposed to bring it in and the teacher was going to ask you questions about it. Maybe she starts in the front right of the room and goes right down the row, goes question by question. So even if you're in row three, you can count up and say all right, she's going to ask me question number 21. So I'm going to make sure I know the answer of 21. Even if I don't have a good answer, that kind of gives me time to formulate what I'm going to say when it gets to that time. That's one way to do it. That's probably the most organized way. It gives students a chance to prepare themselves the way I do it. In that format I can also give other students the chance to for lack of a better phrase show off a little bit, be the student that helps other students.
Greg:If I ask a question of the student and they really don't know well, then I will pick another student and they will answer the question. In fact that might be one way to keep them from just looking up question number 21, because if question number 20 guy didn't know the answer, well, they might ask you question 20 now. So you have to be prepared right across the board. So that's one way of asking questions students, the interaction part. You know I'm not going to say make sure you do this, this is up to you. I always ask questions in a jovial way and even if they don't know the answer, I will say or if it's not. I don't want to say wrong If it's not complete. If it's not a complete answer, I might say, well, that's a good start, can you add to that? Or if it's completely wrong, I was going to say, well, that sounds like you're guessing. How about I give you another shot?
Greg:In fact I had a teacher this was actually a college teacher that if we didn't know the answer to a statistics question and he would college students to go up and write the answer on the board, I mean with all the detailed work and everything, not just the answer but how they got to the answer. And he had this thing he would do because he was going to grade you on whether or not you would answer. But to help you out a little bit, he said all right. He said if he could see you were struggling, he said, man, I really need a drink of water. I'll be back in about 30 seconds. He walks completely out the classroom door. Now, I don't recommend that in elementary, middle and high school, but maybe high school is okay. But he walked out the classroom door for 30 seconds because he knew that the student could ask for help and when he came back in the problem would be complete. And one time the student didn't have time to complete it, even with the help, and he said don't you have any friends in this class? And it was kind of a funny thing, but he gave us the benefit of the doubt. He knew statistics was tough.
Greg:Statistics was always one of my favorite things. I wished I had been a insurance actuary, which are the guys that calculate the rates based on the data. I would love to have had a job like that, but alas I didn't. So that's one way of doing it Give the student the benefit of the doubt. One thing you could do and I've done this before I'll say all right, that was an incomplete answer. I'm going to let you ask somebody else in the classroom to help you with an answer, and I said it can be a friend. But I said you want to ask somebody that you think is going to, is prepared and knows the answer. Because I'm just going to give you one shot. You need to pick a friend that will help you with this answer, and if they help you with it and they get it right, I'll give you credit for the question too. That's one way you can approach it as well. Now I have seen situations where well, not everybody does this, where you jump around, ask different students. I'm going to tell you a story and I think you'll know where I'm going with this.
Greg:I used to work in a department when I was an accountant and I was a manager of about seven people, and once a week we would come in and have a meeting and each one of us would take a turn coming up with some kind of funny business story. But I had one employee that was a nervous wreck talking in front of people like that, even if it was just six people, even if it was just the six people that she worked with every day, and I want it to be fair I wasn't going to let her off the hook. So when it came her turn, she did the best she could. I thought she did fine. Her voice was shaking, her hand was shaking. Her friend next to her it was a hand with her coffee cup in it, so she took the coffee away and said take your time. But you know, she thanked me later, and in fact before I had moved on from that job situation. She'd gotten to the point where she could speak publicly in front of a hundred people and she got her confidence up. She thanked me for that for no other reason than to just pushing her to get that done.
Greg:So same way with these students. If you let students off the hook every time, they're never going to learn to do it. So we need to come up with a way to all right. I know the student's going to struggle. Today while we're asking questions of everybody, I might just kind of finagle the system some so that I ask him one of the questions. That is a little bit easier. Or what I'll do sometimes is split the classroom up into teams. Maybe we've got five teams. I'll tell them that each one of you, I'm going to go around individually, but each one of you has to answer a question, but I'll let you discuss it with your team. Or if we do it that way, then I'll make sure that when I get around to them they have time to look it up or whatever.
Greg:I'm not out to embarrass students. Now, you know some students will get on your nerves and if you're not careful you're going to pick on that student to embarrass them. We don't want to do that. I mean, what's the point of doing that? You wouldn't want to be treated that way, so I don't want to be treated that way either, and I don't want to treat those students that way either.
Greg:I saw one. You know, if you figure out ways to make it fun, this is where I'm going with this, this next part. One of the funnest things I saw, one of the most unique things I saw, was a teacher that made a I guess he just took. He cut and paste some sheets of paper together to make a big, oversized dice. Maybe it was like a six to eight sided dice and he and he would take turns giving it to students and they would roll it and it might say congratulations, you don't have to answer a question this time. Or it might say read the next paragraph. Some students are nervous wrecks reading publicly Just different things like that.
Greg:Answer question number 17. Go to the board and solve the problem that we're talking about, and it was kind of fun. And he, it was made out of paper, so he would let this person that had the dice after they finished throw it to another student. And I might throw it to a friend, but they might just for meanness, and if they, you know you had to catch it. I made a rule that you had to catch it if it's thrown directly to you. If you, you just let it hit you and drop. I'm going to make you do two things, so it worked out well.
Greg:Sometimes teachers just use something as simple as like a Nerf ball, where the teacher themself will throw it to a student and that student has to answer. Then he will either let them throw it back to him or they can throw it to another student. Either way it's still the same thing as just going around the room taking turns answering questions, but the fact that there's some kind of element to it, like throwing a ball around the room, that makes it more fun. So figure out ways to make answering and asking questions more fun. I will say this when I've been long-term and we've asked questions like this and there's a student in there that consistently gets questions wrong, but what? Day seven of a long-term job he finally gets one right. The students cheer for them. That student enjoys the fact that they're cheering for them. He laughs, he smiles, who knows, you never know where. That student enjoyed that feeling so much that he's going to be better prepared from now on. Okay, so I love ways of interacting with students. This is just another way asking them questions.
Greg:Now I will say this, I'll close with this. I guess this past week we had 10 extra minutes and I thought what am I going to do with those 10 minutes? And boy, it was an elementary school class and a grade that didn't change classes and, bless their hearts, you had to teach them every subject in the same day. I know we had like 20 minutes for science and I'm thinking how do you teach science in 20 minutes? But we did do a good enough job of staying on task that when they came in from recess they had about a 10 minute break where they could either read, and I said that one of them after I had already decided to do a trivia game. One of them came and said, hey, can we play a game before we go to lunch? And I said, well, sure, and I had already looked up some questions.
Greg:Now it was elementary school and it was the lower end of elementary school, so I just decided to ask them questions like what's the capital of the United States? They knew it, but at that grade they still had to think about it a little bit. I might ask them an easy one, like who's the president of the United States? And they would still look at each other before they came up with Trump. I might ask them a question about music their music, not my music and I was surprised that. You know it's kind of funny, I knew their music better than they did. But just general questions like that.
Greg:Having said everything that I've said today, the more that you ask a student a question that they're going to know maybe you know they're going to know Well, the better they're going to feel. That gives them confidence. My friend used to. You know I was always good with wanting to learn new words. One of my college classes, the English teacher asked me a question once what is a pundit? And I knew what the answer was and my friends who were in the class with me made fun of me after class, like they would come to me and say who knows what that is? How did you know that? And you know I just like learning new words like that.
Greg:My wife right now is trying to learn Spanish and she's putting me to shame because I'm trying to learn it in the past too and I can't stick with it. And here she's on. She's probably done 20 to 30 hours of it already. She started while we were on our cruise. It's kind of a way to kill time on the beach and stuff like that. So make sure that you come up with a fun way, that you come up with a fun way, a productive way and a satisfying way to ask questions in class and make it a way where, when you leave the classroom that day, you're going to feel good about it and man, the students are too.
