Questioning patterns and teaching strategies in secondary education

Presently one of the main aims of secondary education is the development of the critical and creative thinking. These competencies can be achieved through the stimulation of students’ deep learning, namely through questioning. This essay presents a study of classroom questioning in secondary education, in different disciplines. Here, we are concerned with the role of both teacher's and students’ questions in classroom interaction, and with the relationship between the questioning patterns in the classroom and the teaching strategies. Data were collected by audio recording one class for each teacher: a chemistry teacher, a portuguese teacher and a philosophy teacher participated in this study. The overall results suggest that the three teachers involved in the study showed diverse questioning patterns, as well as their students, and also adopted distinct teaching strategies.