Abstract
Asking questions is a time-honored technique for learning in a variety of contexts dating back to antiquity, but it is also an often-overlooked technique for classroom management. This column, the third in a series about classroom management and the first of two on the particular topic of asking questions, contains two specific questions with which to prompt students before and/or after behavioral incidents. The first question necessitates students to reflect on their own actions, and the second question is about asking students to pay attention to their feelings. Additionally, there are connections provided between these questions and the larger constructs of metacognition and self-esteem.
“Classroom management” is often an umbrella term to encompass the diverse skillsets of conflict resolution, pacing, classroom environment cultivation, and student to teacher relationship building among others. In the first and second articles in this column, I addressed issues of behavioral prevention and betterment through lesson design and teacher language respectively (Robison 2018a, Robison 2018b). In this third column, I go further into the concept of teacher language to focus on the technique of asking questions. In my current role as a music teacher educator, I often see preservice music teachers prepare to address undesirable behaviors from students with predetermined prompts such as “We don’t do that at this school,” or “That’s your first warning”. While such prompts can certainly be effective, they do not put any higher order thinking demands on the student. Instead, the burden of stress remains on the teacher, which can contribute to overall workplace stress, particularly for newer teachers (see Varona, 2018). Furthermore, using vague and predetermined prompts are missed opportunities to build the foundation for augmenting more complex constructs such as metacognition (see Hart, 2014; Power & Powell, 2018), empathy, and self-esteem (see Culp, 2016; Shin, 2011). In short, most ideas you want to communicate are possible to do so with questions instead of one-sided talks. In this column, the first of two about asking questions, I wish to provide some specific questions to ask students for the purposes of classroom management while exploring their possible contributions to building important constructs.
“Can You Explain to Me Why You Should Be Able to Do That, and What You Were Thinking?”
As an inexperienced teacher, this is a question I used to ask out of exasperation when dealing with repeatedly misbehaving students. It was unwise to ask them this question in front of other students, and as a general rule, any kind of public standoff between a teacher and student is not a good idea. However, as a more experienced teacher now, I find this question incredibly effective when asked in a private conversation with a student. It puts the burden on the burden creator and makes the student come up with a rationale for why their behavior was acceptable, which serves several purposes.
First, in most instances, this technique allows you to gather all the information you need, especially if you did not witness an incident. For example, I once was preparing myself to address a student who had yanked his hand away from his partner in a folk dance. I asked this question to the student because it obviously violated our rules about respect, and I was anticipating a mean-spirited response. The truth was, the student’s partner had licked his hand right before reaching out to the student in question. This story continues to serve as a stark reminder to me that we teachers should seek all relevant information before acting.
Second, putting the burden on the students to explain their actions can help the teacher with endurance issues and overcoming an impulsive reaction. More specifically, endurance issues are the instances in which the teacher is not as quick to appropriately react due to fatigue. In my experience, for example, cognitive and physical fatigue would set in right before kindergarten classes at the end of the day. Asking students to explain themselves gave me a moment to think of solutions, which were moments I desperately needed on occasion. Conversely, asking students to explain themselves can prevent a teacher’s impulsive action to a particularly outrageous behavior. For example, in a prekindergarten class, I once saw a male student put his finger near his female classmate’s mouth and repeatedly demand, “Kiss it, kiss it!” I was so outraged, my first instinct was to put myself between the two students and ask a classroom aide to escort the student out of the room, but I asked the student to explain himself. To my relief, he said (paraphrasing), “She stepped on my hand when we were getting up, and my mom says that kissing an ‘owie’ makes it better.” While this behavior was still not acceptable, it was void of the malicious intent I first thought, and I explained that those types of “cures” were OK at home but not at school.
Using This Question to Build Bigger Constructs
This particular question is especially important to deploy in the younger grades, and if you are fortunate enough to see the same students year after year, you can begin to see the dividends of this work as early as second grade in the area of metacognition. Metacognition is the idea of thinking about one’s own thinking. Some authors have made explicit connections between this concept and music education (see Hart, 2016; Power & Powell, 2018), but it is also inherent in any reflection process. In a general music context, thinking about one’s own thinking is essential in common activities and artistic processes, especially responding to music. The concrete examples of classroom management issues are excellent opportunities to guide children to realize that we are all constantly talking to ourselves through our thoughts, and that our actions are often results of our thoughts. With time and practice, students begin to reflect on their own thinking through structures such as “First I thought this, but then I thought that,” which are symptomatic of metacognition.
“How Did That Make You Feel? How Did You Think That Made Them Feel?”
This line of questioning automatically has a connection to the affective (emotional) domain that, along with the cognitive (intellectual), and psychomotor (mind-body connection) domains, completes the three pillars of music education. As one of my mentors used to say, “There are at least two ways of knowing, your head and your heart.” I first used this line of questioning at the request of that mentor, and at the time I thought it was taking too much time to address behaviors at the expense of instruction. However, I have come to realize that the time spent on this approach is simply frontloading in efficiency for a more collegial and collaborative classroom environment, which ultimately affects the music making in class. More specifically, these questions serve two immediate purposes in addition to laying the groundwork for self-esteem.
First, especially in kindergarten, these questions are the most direct way I know how to fill the achievement gap between students who have an awareness of self and others and those who do not. The awareness of self and others is a bedrock goal for early childhood education and early childhood music education (for excellent writing on music early childhood, see Bond, 2011, 2013, Koops, 2017, among others). However, one of the reasons kindergarten teachers are deserving of everyone’s utmost respect is that they often have students who are already well-socialized through prekindergarten programs and other students who have barely interacted with other people besides their caregivers. Asking, “How did that make you feel?” or “How do you think that made them feel?” is often the first step to guiding students who do not have experience with peers to work through self-defeating or socially impeding behavior. From here, important emotions such as sympathy, empathy, and cooperation become more likely, even in the short term of a single class session.
Second, these questions are one of the most lasting ways I know to teach students to crave the feelings of mutual respect and achievement, and to recognize and avoid the feelings of inflicting harm and harboring guilt. When I first used this technique, I assumed I was supposed to ask these questions to the student who just misbehaved, which is true, but it is only half of the technique. The other half of the idea is to ask these questions to students who are behaving well and achieving their goals. Asking a student, “How do you feel?” after sharing an exemplary group composition is an effective way to reinforce the positive effects of the activity. Asking students, “How do you think that made them feel” when those same students give a well-crafted compliment to another group is a perfect way to reinforce giving feedback. In some cases, following up with the prompts, “This is what it feels like to work hard together” or “This is what it makes people feel like to comment on their work” can further drive the point. In short, getting students used to these feelings, to seek or chase those feelings, has intrinsic value, but it is also one of the best preventive techniques to feelings on the other side of the spectrum.
Using These Questions to Build Bigger Constructs
In addition to building capabilities of sympathy, empathy, and kindness, these questions are helpful for contributing to the larger construct of self-esteem. Self-esteem refers to one’s sense of self-worth, to which authors in music education have made direct connections (Culp, 2016; Shin, 2011). To be clear, this is different than self-efficacy, which is a more nuanced term that has classroom management applications, and one I will address in a future column. In a general music context, having a good sense of self-worth is connected to confidence (Culp, 2016; Shin, 2011), which in turn, greatly affects a students’ willingness to try new activities. As elementary general music teachers, we may be the most frequent or even sole provider of opportunities to explore music-making in the first decade of a child’s life, which means many of our students need the confidence to try new activities if they are ever to reach a satisfactory breadth of concepts or depth into a single concept. A constant connection to feelings and the development of self and others are ways of compiling specific and memorable examples to make an abstract concept like self-esteem more tangible in children’s lives.
Concluding Thoughts
Asking questions is an important subset of the language we use with students. While it often necessitates more time than a standard or prefabricated response to disruptions, that time is usually a fruitful investment in helping students manage or even prevent their own undesirable behaviors over the middle and long terms, all while contributing to bigger constructs like metacognition or self-esteem. In this article, I provided two questions for immediate use as well as their connections to the larger constructs they serve over time. In the second article on this particular topic, I will provide additional dependable questions with their construct connections, but I encourage all teachers to consider how to put their tried and true lines they use with their students into the form of a question. For example, even ordinary prompts like “Stop it” can become, “How can you make a plan to make sure that does not happen again?” It is worth an experiment if nothing else, but I think you may find that instead of feeling a need to be ready with a prefabricated response, that there is a sense of relief in simply asking a question after a behavior incident, gathering all the necessary information, insulating yourself from a reaction you may regret, and giving students some responsibility for their actions right away. In all likelihood, you will learn something from your students when affording them the opportunity to reflect out loud from your questions.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
