What Power Tool Do Tutors Use? Good Question(s)!

Questions are a powerful teaching tool used to accomplish some heavy lifting. No matter the tutoring task, questions help accomplish it.

What types of questions give you the most bang for your buck? Specific questions are often more helpful than general ones. If you’d like to know if students are ready to play a communication game, asking students, “What is the first step?” gives you more useful answers than, “Are you ready?” If you’d like to know if students know what strengths means, asking them for examples of strengths gives you more useful responses than “Do you know what strengths means?” Authentic questions can encourage students to give more elaborate answers than display questions.  A display question asks students to show they know the right answer, such as, “Who was the first president?” while an authentic question is one to which the tutor does not know the answer, such as “What do you think makes a good president?”

I invite you to keep reading to see examples of how questions achieve common tutoring tasks.

Explaining Concepts
Learners will make more connections and a tutor can avoid overwhelming students if the tutor begins with eliciting learners’ prior knowledge. These questions can also awaken curiosity about a topic, priming students for learning.

Example: An intermediate ESL class is going to fill in a map of Minnesota with key places of interest. Some questions to ask before proceeding are:

• Name as many places as you can in Minnesota.

• How many lakes do you think are in Minnesota?

• How many hours do you think it takes to drive to Northern Minnesota?

• What do you think and/or wonder about places in Minnesota?

Checking for Understanding and Responding to Errors
Questions are an important way tutors have of checking for understanding of instructions, language, and concepts. As stated above, specific questions result in more useful information. It is helpful to think of your job as a being a detective setting out to elicit student thinking. This is especially true when a student makes an error. Questions are how we discover if the error was due to lack of attention, confusion about foundational concepts, or a need for additional practice. 

Example: A beginning ESL class is gluing pictures of furniture items onto a floor plan and then labeling the rooms and furnishings. A student placed a bed in the room that she labeled “living room.” A couple questions you might ask are:

• How many people live in this apartment?

• What do people do in this living room?

Encouraging Deeper Thinking
Questions can assist learners in turning a basic understanding into the ability to apply their learning to new contexts, to make comparisons, and to make and support claims.

Example 1: After the intermediate students create their Minnesota maps, ask them to make comparisons between Minnesota and other places they have lived.

Example 2: After the beginning students create and label their floor plans, ask them to compare with a partner and talk about the similarities and differences.