When teachers start to focus on developing a culture of thinking, their questioning tends to swing away from procedural and review questions towards facilitative questions that push student thinking and make thinking visible.
Taking his lead from Dylan Wiliam, Ewan McIntosh pleads with teachers to stop ping-pong questioning and try basketball questioning instead:
“Pose a question, pause, ask another kid to evaluate the answer child one gave, and ask a third for an explanation of how and why that’s right or wrong.”
In Creating Cultures of Thinking, Ron Ritchhart also supports the basketball approach,
“It begins to feel more like a basketball game in which we have lots of players taking turns with the ball, rather than a simple back-and-forth with the teacher.” (p. 104)
“the ball (question) is passed around and ideas are bounced off one another, as the ball is moved down the court.” (p. 213)
I have coached basketball for years. Now I’m playing it in class.
I think that using the basketball approach to asking questions in the classroom can have a very positive effect on students. I used to hate it when the “smart kid” in class dominated the class discussions with the teacher and never gave anyone else time to share. Or when a student would give a response that wasn’t fully developed and the teacher would just move on. I think that teachers need to give multiple students the opportunity to grow and expound on others ideas because that is how we learn. Plus, while one student may not be able to fully develop their response because they don’t fully understand the topic it gives them a chance to learn from the other students instead of the teacher moving on and making that student feel dumb.