Reading this article made me really think about how I tend to ask questions and I feel that I really could use some improvement. I believe that many questions that we ask should involve students thinking about what they know and why that may be important to what they are solving. That means that what we look for as teachers should be more than a correct answer but an understanding of how our students are thinking.
I also think that it is very important that Fairbairn informs us of the prevalent procedure of either answering our own questions or repeating the questions if students do not immediately provide us with an answer. It reminds me of Hoffman and Brahier’s article about the differences between American and Japanese teaching practices and how it is not uncommon in Japanese classrooms for students to work on a single problem for 15 minutes while in North America, students who take even a couple minutes to solve a problem may be seen as slow leading to teachers prematurely butting in an interrupting the student’s though process.
Furthermore, if there are students who know the material very well and are able to answer questions quickly, it does not mean that it is a good time to move on. As teachers, we have to remember that we are teaching to more than just the few “good” students but to a whole class of students who each learns at their own pace. It reminds of facilitating competitive games at camp where teams would race to complete various tasks. When teams had finished their tasks, I would tell them to continue working as if they were not finished so they would not discourage the other teams who were slower. I would often give them an additional challenging problem and let them know that this one was just for fun. In this way, teams who were not yet finished still worked as if they had something to achieve and every team had an opportunity to complete the tasks.
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