Provided by Jenny Pritchard

The questioning grid helps ensure that you are asking high order questions to students to challenge them within lessons. It can be used in a variety of ways:

1. As a prompt on your desk to ask questions which provide the right level of support for the various groups/students/topics in your lesson
2. As a tool for students to design their own questions and to understand the higher level requirements
3. As a reflection of the questions that students ask about the lesson
4. As a plenary – you could ask students to write a question about what they have learnt and ask for them to be within the synthesis area etc.
5. A form of active revision for students.

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Provided by Sarah Dukes

Socratic Debate is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking.

In a Socratic debate, students help one another understand a key idea / concept / text through a group discussion format. Students are responsible for facilitating their group discussion, whilst also practicing how to listen to one another.

Format: inner and outer circle.  Inner circle lead discussion; outer circle participate through listening.  Each pupil on outer circle gets a ‘focus card’ with a particular skill to concentrate on (this can be linked to the overall skills within the text, or a skill linked to listening and debating – see examples).

Inner circle – read through the text.  Give them a question to start them off.  They lead the discussion.

• Teach listening skills before
• Give students time to prepare – this can involve reading and annotating a text, writing down key questions, researching a topic etc.
• Give all students an overall objective or learning question to focus their discussion, and encourage them to try and reach an agreement.
• Stick to the rules – outer circle (and teacher) wait to be invited into the discussion; inner circle lead: don’t mind awkward silences at first.
• Have back-up questions ready
• Incorporate time to reflect and evaluate on both S&L skills, but also on the content of the debate.

You can find more information in the CPD folder on Staff Academic.

Provided by Roisin McKeever

I use this resource either at the end of a topic as a revision tool or as a way for students to organise their ideas before writing an answer to a question.

I give each student an A3 version of the following:

With this particular version the students were also provided with some case study information.

This allows the students to build their knowledge, application, analysis and evaluation skills. There can be a level of challenge with this activity as the students will have to compare two factors that they normally would not have linked together. For each pair they are comparing they will have to make a judgement on which one is more important or more successful (depends on the topic and question).

Once the students have completed the sheet I will give them a question to answer – they have to use the information they have put together, select the most appropriate pieces of information and either discuss it as a class or write the answer.

An editable version of the connectagon can be found in the 15 minute forum folder in Staff Academic.