by Kristen Wilkerson

Created on: April 11, 2011   Last Updated: November 06, 2011

Challenging students requires a teacher to give up some power.  Yes, you heard that correctly.  Teachers who structure the learning environment and serve as facilitators inevitably challenge students more than teachers who lecture with a traditional approach.  The best teachers challenge students by engaging them in conceptual dialogue, include higher level questioning techniques, and helping students see relevance to their learning.

Engagement

First of all, teaching requires student engagement.  To challenge students, good teachers often engage students in the concept at hand rather than simply lecturing from the front of the classroom.  For example, in an advanced algebra course, a teacher could discuss the country's current debt.  Students would discuss the trend of the debt's growth as being either linear or exponential.  The teacher would expect students to support their answer with regression mathematics and using a correlation coefficient. This example is an open-ended question.  More than one answer is correct, as long as students support their reasoning with math.

Challenging questions

Another way teachers challenge students to include higher levels of thinking in their questions.  Rather than asking "what" or "when", good teachers continue to the "why" or "how" questions.  Asking students to write a narrative or explain their answer in a complete sentence are additional techniques for challenging a student. 

Questions which are structured upon Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives help a teacher know which questions to ask.  The main categories of Bloom's Taxonomy in the cognitive domain start with the knowledge level, move through comprehension and application, then end with analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.  The teacher's choice of question or task increases the challenge a student must undertake.

Application

Good teachers challenge students to draw conclusions about how their learning relates to the world around them.  All too often students commit information to short-term memory, regurgitate facts on a unit test, then forget the material.  Teachers encourage students to think outside the box by asking them to apply concepts to real world scenarios.  When successfully using math, history, or writing in a real life scenario, students typically internalize the concept because they see the material as important to remember. 

As teachers reflect upon their teaching practices, they should be sure to address the amount of interaction students have with the concepts.  Teachers should also ask students to analyze and synthesize lessons while applying the information to real life. Using these teaching techniques will help a teacher challenge his or her students successfully.

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