Case 3: Helping Teacher Candidates Pose Purposeful Questions

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2014) claimed that “Effective teaching of mathematics uses purposeful questions to assess and advance students’ reasoning and sense making about important mathematical ideas and relationships” (p. 35). Questioning is an essential and important skill for teachers to understand and develop student mathematical thinking (Boaler & Bordie, 2004). However, teacher candidates (TCs) often have trouble in posing appropriate questions and facilitating meaningful discourse during their field teaching experience. The purpose of this case is to describe a pilot effort of using role-playing methods to help TCs improve their questioning skills.

A majority of TCs in my elementary and middle school mathematics methods course acknowledged the importance of asking higher level questions to advance students’ mathematics understanding. However, in their lesson plans, they only listed three or four “what,” “how,” or “why” questions and surmised it would be natural for them to come up with more suitable questions as they interacted with their students while teaching. Nevertheless, they often struggled with posing proper questions “due to different approaches to solving a problem, multiple solutions of some problems, lack of knowledge in understanding how students think mathematically, and low comfort level of their own understanding of certain mathematical concepts” (Childs & Glenn-White, 2018, p. 12).