Often we adults engage students with closed-ended questions and then consider this as having a conversation with the student. I witnessed this first hand in a high school consumer math course I co-taught. The adults sat with the students the first day after December break for a conversation about their break. The questions were consisted of and were similar to the following. “Did you have fun?” “Did you eat a lot?” For some, like my son, this is appropriate. For many others, we are offering low hanging fruit that does little to move them forward.
Ask open-ended questions that prompt the student to engage in critical thinking such as analyzing and evaluating – below, courtesy of Jessica Shabatura. Work this into IEPs and 504 to have teachers implement this. For example, I asked the students what they liked about break. Then I asked why they liked it. Here is an example of me questioning my son, who does not have a disability, when he was maybe 4.
