Abstract:

Pupil’s question is considered to be one of the basic preconditions for successful beginning of pupil’s learning. The ability to formulate pupil’s questions demonstrates pupil’s interest in the instruction, pupil’s motivation to discuss the instruction content and a desire to solve problems. Experience from practice confirms that pupil’s questions in mathematics lessons represent an important position for genesis of given field. Mathematics was born out of a dialogue therefore a pupil’s question should undoubtedly be a part of the educational process.

Given that teacher’s instruction strategy may be viewed from different perspectives, our goal was to discover how a teacher applying dialogic teaching strategy creates space for pupil’s questions. Dialogic teaching strategy encourages pupils in active communication in lessons and puts emphasis on communication between agents of educational process.

The participants of our pilot study were 5 mathematics teachers of grades 4 a 5, 2 of them were novice teachers (with teaching practice up to 2 years) and 3 of the participants were teachers with 8 – 12 years teaching practice. Convenience sampling was used. With the method of semi-structured interviews, we inquired what steps a teacher purposely takes to support formation of pupil’s questions.

From a descriptive description it is clear that teachers focused on dialogic teaching strategy in mathematics lessons do not focus on pupil’s questions on purpose. However, they consider the pupil’s ability to ask a question in problem solution crucial. The most significant finding in our research is the information that according to the teachers the most important is to create learning tasks which mobilize pupil’s thinking in mathematics lessons and also pupil’s attempts to name the problem with his or her question. A higher cognitive difficulty is typical for such question.

However, the results of the present study cannot be generalized because the qualitative research of primary mathematics teachers has its limitation in personal preferences of participants, given that 3 from 5 personally actively support dialogic teaching strategy.

The conclusions of the research demonstrate that purposefully chosen dialogic teaching strategy may help the teacher to create space for pupil’s question. Compared with previous research it can be said that an active participation of pupils in instruction is a teacher’s feedback and it refers to the effectiveness of his or her teaching procedures.

Keywords:

Pupil´s question, teaching strategy, pupil’s ability to ask.