Have you ever found yourself asking a learner a sequence of simpler and simpler, more and more focused questions, until eventually you reach a really simple one they can actually answer?

Heinrich Bauersfeld called it funnelling when, because there is no response to your first question, you ask another question, perhaps more focused, more specific, or simpler.  If you are not careful, this can end up as a sequence of simpler and simpler questions.

John Holt captured the phenomenon beautifully in his description of an interaction with Ruth.

I remember the day not long ago when Ruth opened my eyes. We had been doing math, and I was pleased with myself because, instead of telling her answers and showing her how to do problems, I was ‘making her think’ by asking her questions. It was slow work. Question after question met only silence. She said nothing, did nothing, just sat and looked at me through those glasses, and waited. Each time, I had to think of a question easier and more pointed than the last, until I finally found one so easy that she would feel safe in answering it. So we inched our way along until suddenly, looking at her as I waited for an answer to a question, I saw with a start that she was not at all puzzled by what I had asked her. In fact, she was not even thinking about it. She was coolly appraising me, weighing my patience, waiting for the next, sure-to-be-easier question. I thought, ‘I’ve been had!’. The girl had learned how to make me do her work for her, just as she had learned to make all her previous teachers do the same thing. If I wouldn’t tell her the answers, very well, she would just let me question her right up to them. [John Holt 1964 p24]

One way to avoid funnelling is to increase your wait time before you ask another.  It may help to freeze because any movements you make while you are waiting signal that you are thinking about something else, so learners are likely to follow suit.

Questioning Mathematically

Question & Answer Interactions

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