12.14 Questioning / Facilitation Techniques

Oral questioning has a wide range of uses in flight instruction. Questions that require the recall from memory of a fact usually start with who, what, when or where. Questions that require the student to combine knowledge of facts with the ability to analyse a situation, solve problems or arrive at conclusions usually start with why or how.

Eight desirable results of oral questioning

The instructor's use of oral questioning can have a number of desirable results:

  • It reveals the effectiveness of your instruction.
  • It checks the student's retention of what has been learned.
  • It reviews material already covered by the student.
  • It can be used to retain the student's interest and stimulate thinking.
  • It can be used to emphasize important points.
  • It checks student comprehension.
  • It may identify points that need more emphasis.
  • It promotes active student participation, which is essential to learning.

Where the questioning discipline is developed in depth

The full questioning, facilitation, and active-listening discipline lives in three other places in the cluster, with this section serving as the duty anchor that names questioning as a duty of the instructor:

  • 3.5 Questioning (and the section files that follow it) is the depth treatment of questioning technique: types, structure, putting the question, handling student answers, additional techniques.
  • 7.3 General Debrief Techniques is the post-session counterpart, where the same questioning techniques are applied to debrief facilitation.
  • A1.4 Facilitation Techniques is the FSF / NASA upstream source for the facilitation question patterns.

Connections