Targeted Questioning: Teach Like a Champion Strategies

Targeted Questioning: A quick series of carefully chosen, open-ended questions directed at a strategic sample of the class and executed in a short period of time.

Targeted Questioning is a Teach Like a Champion Strategy that aims to ensure all students are understanding the most important aspects of a lesson. Targeted Questioning replaces unreliable forms of questioning, like self reporting where a teacher simply asks the class, "Does everyone get it?" and a few kids mumble yes or shake their heads. Self reporting does not really tell a teacher if kids understand, but Targeted Questioning can.

There are a few important principles of Targeted Questioning:

1. Plan Ahead: Choose a few transitional points in your lesson where you know in advance you want to ask a few questions to see if kids learned a concept. This may add time to your lesson, but choosing a few points throughout the lesson instead of one at the end will help you catch points of confusion early in the learning process.

2. Write the Questions in Advance: Prepare questions in advance, ideally when you are lesson planning. While this may take extra time, it frees up your brain power during the lesson to analyze how well kids are understanding the content. For each transitional point, have a few questions ready that will help you assess how well kids have learned the information.

3. Speed Counts: Each time Targeted Questioning is used in a lesson, it should take less than a minute or two. If the questions take longer, it's harder to consistently work Targeted Questioning into your lesson.

4. Sample Strategically: When calling on kids to answer the questions, try to call on 5-6 kids who represent the range of abilities in the room (2 kids who struggle, 2 kids in the middle, and 1-2 kids who get things quickly). Select the specific kids you will call on in advance to save time.

5. Cold Call: Cold Call takes place when the teacher chooses who will answer the questions without asking students to raise their hands. (Cold Call is a separate Teach Like a Champion Strategy.) If you only call on kids raising their hands, you are not getting a strategic sample but rather a group of kids who are all confident that they did learn the material. Use Cold Call with Sample Strategically to get the most accurate data from your class.

This quick clip shows the importance of Strategic Sampling and Cold Call to get an accurate read of what kids know.

If this teacher only called on the students with their hands raised, she would not have known that Kayla did not understand what clever meant.

Targeted Questioning goes well with Feedback because taking the time to question kids in this way allows them to show the teacher what they know. It also gives the teacher an opportunity to let students know how they are doing and what might need to be fixed.

Once you are comfortable working Targeted Questioning into your lessons, you can add more variety to the questions in the form of things like partnering, white boards, clickers/plickers, etc.

What are some of your favorite times and methods for Targeting Questioning? Feel free to leave ideas in the comments below.

Source: Teach Like a Champion 2.0 by Doug Lemov, pages 34-39.