Bingo Questioning!!

There was an interesting article in the Telegraph a few weeks ago about 'rowdy boys dominating questions' and suggesting teachers should devise strategies whereby pupils have an equal chance of responding to questions. The articel can be found here. Better questioning is an area that I am personally very interested in I've written a couple of blogs on questioning strategies which can be found here and here.

The article reminded me of a strategy I used to help ensure that all pupils in my Year 7 Geography class had an equal chance of being asked a question in a lesson and is simply called, Bingo Questioning.

At the start of the year, I bought a bingo machine from Argos. There are various ones available and I paid about £6.99 for mine. I then gave all my pupils in the class a number from 1 upwards which they made a note of in their books. The bingo machine has numbers from 1-99 so I removed the numbers that didnt have pupils associated with them. Then, at the end of the lesson when I was carrying out the plenary I would use the bingo machine to select the pupils to respond to questions. This made sure that all pupils had an equal chance of responding and also allowed me to differentiate my approach by ensuring my questions matched the ability of the pupil.

I also found that students loved the bingo machine as they didnt feel as though I was singling them out.

Of course, you could simply put numbers in a bag but the bingo machine adds an element of novelty to the lesson as well as adding a bit of theatre.