A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

82 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
How you ask questions is important in fostering student responses. Body language
displaying an indifferent, aggressive, closed or anxious manner will be less effective. An
open, warm, challenging or sensitive manner may gain more responses of a thoughtful
nature.
Interrogating practice
When you are asked a question by a student, what are some of the things
you can do other than directly answering the question?
The above activity concentrates on your reactions to student questions. Some of
these reactions may result in students being able to answer their own questions. However,
there will be times when you will directly answer the question. Directly answering
questions during a group meeting takes less time than attempting to encourage the
student or group to come up with the answers. If you choose to answer directly, make
your answer brief and to the point. After responding, you may wish to check that
you have really answered the question by saying something like: ‘Does that answer your
question?’
The timing of asking questions and the use of pause and silence are also important
in developing the skills of answering and asking questions. Taking these matters into
consideration may in part address the common problem teachers in higher education
report – that students do not contribute during small group sessions.
Listening
The mental process of listening is an active one that calls into play a number of
thinking functions including analysis, comprehension, synthesis and evaluation. Genuine
listening also has an emotional dimension since it requires an ability to share, and
quite possibly understand, another person’s feelings, and to understand his or her
situation.
Intellectual and emotional meanings are communicated by the listener and speaker in
both verbal and non-verbal forms. Thus how you listen will be observable through
gestures and body language. Your listening skills may be developed by thinking about
all the levels of a student’s comment in this way:
• what is said: the content;
• how it is said: tone and feelings;
• when it is said: time and priority;
• where it is said: place and environment.