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Questioning, questioning

Questioning, questioning

6 May 2025

Read time: 5mins

‘More often than not, before a “spontaneous” enquiry can be stimulated, a certain amount of pre-teaching needs to be delivered.’

Jon Cannell

Is ‘What is the capital city of England?’ a ‘good’ question to ask? Is ‘What makes London a unique capital city?’ a ‘better’ question?

One is closed, the other open. One leads to the learning of an absolute fact, the other is subject to varied interpretations and perspectives, personal bias and social stereotyping as well as the requirement of both time and energy to collect, analyse and communicate findings.

Classrooms are renowned as time poor environments where the sheer volume of the content can overwhelm teachers. This can lead to an uninspiring, dry, ‘chalk and talk’ approach where learning is being done to the pupils, rather than involving them in the process. Questions, if opportunity allows, are asked, responses are perhaps offered and the lesson moves on apace.

So again, which is the better question?

An important component of the conversation has to focus on the need to support pupils to be able to ask that very question, to be able to consider what kind of information they want to collect and be equipped with an array of question types to bring the desired facts, figures, opinions and interpretations into view.

As geography teachers a key part of our role is to model our thinking, to stand in front of a class and provide a commentary on how we would find out about a place, issue, event or process. Imagine starting a lesson by acting (we’re all actors at heart!) enthusiastically responding to a stimulus such as a picture.

Out loud you ask question after question, before starting to sort the questions into those that will help unlock and make better sense of the information held within the image. This won’t be done alone of course, as your infectious enthusiasm will have captured the imagination of the class, fueling what Margaret Roberts labels as ‘a genuine need to know’.

You will entrust the class to be the sounding board for your thinking, simultaneously engaging them in the enquiry and suggesting that you value their input through, for example, ‘I’d love to know more about what causes volcanic eruptions and want to explore one of my questions: “Volcanoes explode all over the world.” What do you think? Is that a good question to start things off? Would it get me closer to knowing how volcanoes erupt? Could it be improved? Do I need a different question?’

Again, acting skills are front and centre as you seamlessly steer pupils to the predetermined question in your planning, ‘What causes volcanic eruptions?’ Although if it ends up being ‘Why do volcanoes erupt?’ or ‘Why are volcanic eruptions so explosive…destructive… deadly?’ the learning outcomes will be the same and pupils will feel more invested in elements of the enquiry process shown in figure 1, and therefore more likely to go on to engage in learning about volcanoes. Flexibility can be considered as another important component of facilitating a successful geographical enquiry.

Figure 1

The choice you now face is which resources do you just happen to have on hand to help investigate the agreed question/s? Websites, books, photos, infographics or even a member of staff who you ‘seem to remember’ speaking to about their recent visit to a country with active volcanoes and is serendipitously available this lesson to share their personal experiences and even a photo or two!

Of course your choice of resources has been pre-determined and students are able to access the information to (partially) answer the questions whether by collectively analysing text and images on the whiteboard or through independently taking notes from the sources used.

The selected resources, together with more modelling by yours truly, stimulate the creation of subsidiary questions such as ‘Are all volcanic eruptions violent?’ or ‘Can volcanoes just appear anywhere, at any time?’ Which fortuitously segue perfectly into the planned content for the next lesson around ‘Where on Earth can we find volcanoes?’

Of course, not everything in geography is quite so explosively engaging and attention grabbing as volcanoes. Nor is it as likely to have the same amount of prior knowledge attached to it, as from an early age pupils are likely to have seen images of fiery volcanoes and been exposed to stories containing lava and ‘pyroclastic flows’ they just didn’t delve into the what, how or why of it all, until a geographical lens was employed. More often than not, before a ‘spontaneous’ enquiry can be stimulated, a certain amount of pre-teaching needs to be delivered. This is important in three quite distinct ways:

Firstly, it provides pupils with some background knowledge around the content which will also provide the inspiration and stimulation to create that genuine need to know which fires curiosity. For example, if we are going to study a region of Italy, let’s say Sicily and incidentally it is no accident that this unit is sequenced before the unit of work on volcanoes, then the first two or three lessons will provide an overview of the region, immersing pupils in the sights and sounds of the region through the use of maps, images, texts, videos and even tasting some Mediterranean food!

I know that this is teetering on the edge of a proxy for learning, however it is all about ensuring the end points are clear. Imagine the following start to a lesson… ‘Today we are going to taste some Sicilian delicacies and consider why they might be eaten in that part of the world.’ It is the ‘why’ that is important here as it allows geographical learning objectives to be set that cover aspects of climate, land use (agricultural), seasonality, trade and culture as well as considering possible impacts of current/ future societal and climate change.

It also provides an opportunity to make links with other areas of the curriculum such as history and food tech, which again increases the likelihood of piquing the interest of more of your pupils.

Figure 2

Secondly by delivering the content through asking and answering a range of both broad and directed questions an opportunity is created to model and even explicitly teach understanding of aspects of the geographical enquiry process, outlined in figure 2. Over multiple units of work this provides pupils with the disciplinary knowledge to work and apply as geographers, moving them from dependent to independent learners as advocated by Ofsted:

‘In a few schools, teachers used geographical enquiry well to help develop pupils’ disciplinary knowledge. Pupils were taught how geographers identify questions, collect, present and analyse data, and then reach and evaluate their conclusions.’

Ofsted Geography Report, September 2023

And thirdly a number of other geographical skills and ways of working can be introduced, consolidated and developed, including:

exploring geographical concepts such as interconnections and changes over space and time

Figure 3

Geographical enquiry is an integral part of the discipline, see figure 3, as it enables the collection of substantive knowledge or ‘knowing about’ the world whilst simultaneously providing pupils with the knowledge of how to create and refine the thought provoking questions necessary to investigate and research, evaluate and analyse, synthesize and communicate information. This, like most elements of learning, is not a switch that can simply be flicked on but requires time and opportunity for pupils to build a repertoire of enquiry and problem solving skills to employ independently.

Ultimately pupils don’t know what they don’t know and unless they are inspired, motivated and supported to build knowledge any learning outcomes will often suggest that they have neither altered existing knowledge, nor acquired any new knowledge… in essence they still don’t know what they don’t know. This might result in entire sequences of learning culminating in pupils sharing large chunks of text simply copied and pasted from a single inaccurate and/or biased website.

So, in many ways there is no such thing as a bad question and we need to be encouraging, enabling and empowering pupils to ask, sort, investigate and interpret responses to as many questions each day as possible.