Jessica Bowlby

5 March 2018

ARTEDUC 4300

Mr. McGuire

Observation 2

On the day that I observed for types of questioning, the students were all working on

projects that they had started the day before. The sixth graders were working on scrambled

drawing projects, while the eighth graders were working on a headline for the school’s

newspaper contest. I listened to questions that the teacher asked students for the entire day and

noticed that most questions being asked were from the bottom two sections of Bloom’s

Taxonomy chart. They are “remembering,” which is remembering information, and

“understanding,” which is grasping concepts and meanings. These two sections of Bloom’s

Taxonomy are considered to be “lower-order thinking skills.” I do not think that the questions

that were being asked were not important questions to consider, but the day that I was observing

was the second day of working on projects so I can assume that the “higher-order thinking skills”

questions had been asked the day before. When the classes came into the classroom they got a

short refresher on the project they were to be working on and then they had the rest of the class

to work. I would assume that higher-order thinking questions from the top of the Bloom’s

Taxonomy chart had been asked the day prior when the projects had just been explained to the

students.

Most of the questions were about how to complete certain tasks, what order to complete

steps in, which tools to use and how, and when the due date was for the project. Also, instead of
just explaining aspects of the class such as rules, the teacher would ask the students and have

them tell him the rules to make sure that they remembered. Additionally, I noticed that the

teacher would include other students in answering questions. For example, if a question was

asked by a student that the teacher had already explained to the class earlier, the teacher would

look to one of the other students to answer the question. This made the student aware that the

question had already been answered and that they just were not paying attention. I think it is a

good idea to ask the students questions to make them think instead of just simply answering their

questions. Also, if the teacher was asking the entire class a question and no one knew the answer,

he would rephrase the question, drop hints, or give the students additional information so that

they could come to a conclusion.