The Importance of Open Ended Questions

My shy, timid, and very literal grandson worked up courage to ask his teacher to repeat the directions when he didn’t remember what to do. Her response was, “Were you listening when I gave the directions?”

He later told his mom, “I wanted to be truthful, so I said no.”

The teacher accepted the no answer with no followup inquiry and would not repeat the directions for him. I think because it was happening frequently.

Here’s the rest of what he told his mom. “When the teacher is talking I get so distracted. I really try to listen, but I can’t. And then I feel overwhelmed and I don’t know what to do on my papers.” Now two months into school he doesn’t want to ask for help anymore, so he sits confused and then gets marked down for not finishing his work. He also describes his teacher as being disappointed in him, which makes him sad.

Mom believes this teacher to be a good teacher and genuinely doing what she thinks is best and wants to help her students. But she is a newer teacher and hasn’t thought of other possible reasons for the inattention.

The obvious here is ADHD. But because he does not have the hyperactivity, it would be easy to miss. After the above conversations, mom is getting an ADHD evaluation.

Another possible reason is the mode of the directions. If I ask someone for driving directions (or did before GPS) I would need for the person to repeat the directions 3 or 4 times and still wouldn’t catch it all if there were too many steps. But if someone wrote them down for me I could look at it once and pretty much have it memorized. I am a visual learner. My grandson is a visual learner. It may be that he just doesn’t do well with oral directions.

A third possible reason a student may not catch oral directions is how fast or slow their processing speed is. If they have a slow processing speed they cannot hold all the information long enough to act on it.

I’m sure there are even more reasons.

All this is to say, an open ended question might have revealed some of my grandson’s angst. What if instead of “Were you listening?” the teacher asked something more like, “I notice you often have trouble with directions. Can you explain to me what happens in your brain when I am telling the class what to do?”

That kind of question would give him the opportunity to share with the teacher the way he shared with mom. He would feel more safe and less judged. And he would be telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Can you think of other ways open ended questions can help when ascertaining what’s going on in a student’s head? Or other examples of where an open ended question would have helped? I’d love to hear from you. Be sure to connect in the comments section either using the form or emailing directly.