Product reviews for Powerful Questioning

At the heart of every great lesson is questioning. Yet, for years, the CPD around questioning had been limited to simply ‘closed questions are bad’ and ‘open questions are good’. If we were lucky, then someone might even waft Bloom’s taxonomy to spice things up or the facilitator might get you to throw questions scrunched into paper balls or pass questions around on Post-it notes, because it was done once in an ‘Outstanding’ lesson.

Michael Chiles’ Powerful Questioning is a thoughtful and thorough exploration of how to effectively use questioning in the classroom. Rather than looking at fancy tricks, Chiles explores the creation, use, function and impact of questions in education. The narrow focus really helps you to refine and question your existing practice. As the title suggests, questioning can be powerful and we, as practitioners, need to explore and consider how we can make every interaction have an impact in the classroom.

A book that proves that you can teach an old dog, like me, a few tricks and, of course, there’s loads of stuff for new dogs, I mean teachers, too.