Good questions to ask the teacher and your child

[Cortina]

Questions to ask the teacher. These are questions Guy Claxton has suggested in What's The Point Of School.

Included here as I think they may be helpful, different and interesting:

Is there a good spirit of learning in the classroom? Do teachers ask and offer help to get better at their jobs? Do staff talk about learning or troublemakers?

How do you demonstrate to my child and me what you genuinely value more than exams and good behaviour?

How do you encourage children's curiosity outside the set curriculum?

How much real responsibility do my children have to choose what, when and how they are learning?

How much opportunity does my child get to help teachers improve their teaching?

How do you check whether your intention to help children become better learners is being realised? What do you know about the lives of your past students after they have left your school?

Do you value education as a preparation for lifelong learning?

And questions to ask your children:

Which learning muscles have you been stretching?
Did you ask a good question?
Did you risk tackling something new?
Did you make any interesting mistakes?
How could you have helped your teacher get that tricky stuff across better?
How would you organise the lesson differently?
What did you manage to improve?

I love these. Will try out tonight.

I also like the 3 Rs: how do you encourage/develop Reflection on what the child's just done/learnt ; Resilience to struggle with things that stretch them; use of Resources to help them solve problems and learn.

Ugh. I'm not sure I'd enjoy having these questions asked at parents' evening. They're more what I'd expect at a job interview....

'How much opportunity does my child get to help teachers improve their teaching?!' Answer in no less than 5000 words, to be handed in by......

I'm so glad all of my sets of parents just wanted to know whether their children had any friends, how their children were progressing, and what they could do to help at home.

Get a life.

"How much real responsibility do my children have to choose what, when and how they are learning?"

?

The book could also be titled 'how to make yourself really unpopular at parents' evening'

Though judging from 'Guy's' title, he may be slightly biased as to what answers he is expecting?

And here are two more, primarily aimed at headteachers:

how many hours do you set aside per family on parents evenings?

and do you provide stretchers to remove teachers when they collapse from 36 hours of solid questioning?

They are indeed questions that expect a certain answer. Or, I would suspect, an inability to answer, accompanied by a knowing from vindicated parents.

"How much opportunity does my child get to help teachers improve their teaching?" ...

Actually, I would be very happy to answer some of them. I'd probably actually offer answers to these without being asked:

"How do you encourage children's curiosity outside the set curriculum?"

and

"How do you check whether your intention to help children become better learners is being realised?"

do we get to ask parents any questions?

I have a few choice ones

Hmm after this little lot I think a good question would be

"Do you now feel the need to down a litre of neat gin?"

I think they might be interesting questions to ask the Head teacher while they are showing you around the school.

Q Which learning muscles have you been stretching?
A We didn't do stretching

Q Did you ask a good question?
A What?

Q Did you risk tackling something new?
A NO!

Q Did you make any interesting mistakes?
A My Mistake Monster makes mistakes

Q How could you have helped your teacher get that tricky stuff across better?
A Don't know

Q How would you organise the lesson differently?
A Can I watch TV?

Q What did you manage to improve?
A Can't remember

What would you hope to achieve by asking teachers these questions? And at what point would you ask them?

If in parent's evening - do you think you would hve found out how your child is doing, how they enjoy school or not, what their work is like, whether they are progressing, whether they are behaviing, what their targets are, etc?

These seem more like questions for managers or assessor's to ask teachers during more formal discussions.

I can imagine most childrens responses to the last few questions, lol!

I think that it would be a complete waste of the teachers time. If you want that sort of answer it would be best to get the Head to have a meeting, for those interested, and get a response to all of them. There is no way that you would get my DCs to answer those questions-they would look at me as if I was mad! I think that teachers should be able to make a list of searching questions for parents-the answers would be really interesting.

I would feel like an over-zealous nutter asking these questions to my children and their teachers. I have no problem asking my children questions to get to the root of things.

And I would ask those questions of a teacher either a) in a line-manager capacity or b) down the pub.

I think some of those questions might be quite useful as a focus for teacher discussion or for a school to use as prompts when looking at its aims, values and philosophy of learning.
For a parent to ask them in a parent teacher meeting? - don't make me laugh.
.

I expect that if you read all the information from the school that the answers would be in there somewhere anyway.

My answer:-

'Giime a break. I'm a teacher, not a f*ing saint'.

have you ever actually spoken to a teacher?

DS (8)'s answers to the children's questions:

Which learning muscles have you been stretching? What? Is learning a muscle? The brain isn't a muscle? Pair working in maths. I find that hard (so true!!)
Did you ask a good question? Nope.
Did you risk tackling something new? Pair working again (hardly new - but if it went well...)
Did you make any interesting mistakes? I can't think of any mistakes ()
How could you have helped your teacher get that tricky stuff across better? I understood everything ()
How would you organise the lesson differently? What?
What did you manage to improve? I worked in a pair.

He is focusing on the positive I think...

I suppose there are children in this world who would not feel patronised if asked "which learning muscles have you been stretching?". But mine, alas, are not among them.

I think nearly every DC would feel patronised if they had been asked 'which learning muscles they had been stretching'. You wouldn't ask an adult that so why talk down to a DC?
I wouldn't have thought it necessary to ask the teacher (who already has a huge work load)those questions, I would know the answers to most of them anyway. The time to ask them would be when you looked around the school with a view to sending your DC.
I think OP is a bit out of touch. A teacher wouldn't go around asking patronising questions, but the more sensible ones would be asked on a daily basis anyway.