Probing Questions to Support Concept Development

Intentionality

I took a workshop on supporting children with intentional teaching.  It was a wonderful class and I came away with a lot of useful information.  The focus of the workshop was to give ideas on how to encourage children’s scientific inquiry skills by allowing them to observe, question, seek their own answers to problems, evaluate, develop mental relationships, having conversations about discoveries, developing theories and documentation.

At first it seems like it’s easier said than done but a lot of this can be done through conversation and open ended questions.  Open ended questions have no right or wrong answer.  This way of asking questions stimulates language use, teaches that there are more ways than one way to solve a problem, affirms children's ideas and encourages creative thinking.  Here is a list of open ended questions and responses that will help you support children's concept development.

• Tell me your idea.
• What does it look like?
• Tell me how you did that.
• What does it feel like?
• What do you wish would happen?
• What can you do next time?
• What is happening?
• What can you tell me about it?
• What's another way you might .....?
• Which one do you have more of?
• How do you think you can find out?
• Is one larger or smaller than another?  Or is it the same?
• What would it look like if .....?
• What do you call the things that you are using?
• What else can you do or use?
• How are you going to do that?
• When did you do that before?
• What will you do next after you finish that?
• What did you see?
• How do you know?
• Why did you decide to use ..... instead of .....?
• What is it made of?
• What do you think the problem is?
• Show me what you could do with it.
• How did you conclude that?
• Can you think of another way you can do this?
• What is the connection between ..... and .....?
• What do you think you could do next?
• What is the problem?
• Why is it a problem?
• I see that you .....
• What does this make you think of?
• I noticed that ..... happened.
• In what ways are these different?
• In what ways are they the same?
• What would happen if .... ?
• What materials did you use?
• What do you notice about .....?
• What might you try instead?
• How are you going to do that?
• Tell me about your .....
• What can you do to fix it?

These open-ended questions can be written on sentence strips and placed high up on a wall or the complete list can be placed on a clipboard and hung somewhere that is easily seen and referenced.  Doing this helped me get used to the questions and gave me ideas to use when working with the children.