Purpose This study explores prospective classroom teacher (PCT) question types and their role in initiating productive student-led talk. Design/Approach/Methods This study is a naturalistic inquiry focusing on the structure, nature, and productivity of PCT questions using data collected from 24 fourth-grade (exit-level) PCTs. Video-based data were analyzed via systematic observation. Findings This study identified nine types of teacher questions. Of these, six types—namely, communicating, monitoring-framing, critiquing, legitimating, evidencing, and modeling—were explicitly related to productive classroom talk indicators. While the remaining three question types—observe-compare-predict, concluding and naming, and maintaining—contributed to the variation in PCT questions, they were not directly linked to the indicators of talk productivity. Moreover, the critiquing, legitimating, and modeling questions expected to foster talk productivity were seldom asked, with classroom discourse dominated by communicating questions. Originality/Value The literature has yet to observe and systematically analyze the productivity of PCTs’ in-class questions. In addressing this gap, this study presents a wide-ranging and qualitatively oriented coding catalogue to identify several aspects of academically productive classroom discourse that can be triggered and maintained by PCTs’ questioning behaviors.

It is still less known how teachers organize classroom dialog to foster intellectual contributions to classroom talks. The current study developed a coding scheme to clarify science teacher questions and identify how different questions affect students’ talk productivity. The participants were 28 fifth-grade students and a science teacher who conducted argument-based implementations. The verbatim transcriptions were analyzed through a systematic observation approach. The teacher elaborated on the students’ background reasoning in a metacognitive learning setting. In addition, the teacher assigned the students as co-evaluators of the credibility of the presented ideas. The teacher invited the students to re-consider their ideas’ explanatory power by displaying discrepant questions. Moreover, the students had to propose justified claims once they were requested to support their propositions with ample and proper data. The teacher used his questions to guide the students to handle basic process skills and make inferences regarding natural phenomena under consideration. The legitimating, discrepant, and justified talk questions fostered the students’ talk productivity than the eliciting, metatalk, process skills, and inference questions. Recommendations are offered around the teacher noticing term regarding the relationship between questions asked in science classrooms and students’ talk productivity.

Purpose This study explores the relationships between the cognitive demands of the questions asked by a teacher educator (TE) and prospective teachers’ (PT) capacity for critical thinking (CT). Design/Approach/Methods Participants comprised a TE and 32 PTs. The cognitive demands of the TE's questions and PTs’ CT were analyzed using a systematic observation approach. Findings Results indicate that there are tangible connections between the increasing mental demand of TE questions and PTs’ higher-order cognitive processing. The PTs achieved higher-order CT when the TE asked more cognitively demanding questions. For instance, when the TE's questions were pitched at the cognitive demand levels—namely, the analyze, evaluate, and/or create levels—the PT answers were longer and reflected higher CT, such as inductive reasoning, suggesting new ways of thinking, or legitimating the arguments of others. Accordingly, results suggest that intentionally subjecting PTs to sustained higher cognitive demands via questions may help them reach their optimal CT capacity. Originality/Value Although proposed teaching strategies have been invaluable in proposing content-specific interventions for fostering the CT of university students, how lecturers should use their questions to conduct such interventions has been overlooked. This study addresses this gap.

The related literature implies that phenomenographic arguments on teaching conception are primarily developed for in-service teachers or university educators. There is also an ongoing tenet among educational phenomenographers that instructors’ conceptions of teaching are inquired into by discriminating teacher-centered and student-centered modes of teaching from each other. In addressing these two issues, first, the present study established a phenomenographic argument regarding prospective teachers’ (PTs) experience-based conceptions of the teaching phenomenon. Second, the current study considers teaching phenomenon in a broader sense within five hierarchical categories: monological, dialogical, dialectical, adaptive-pragmatic, and reflective. A phenomenographic research was conducted to comprehend 39 senior PTs’ teaching conceptions. It is concluded that the PTs mainly experienced and reported three focused dimensions of the phenomenon: monological, dialogical, and dialectical. However, two more sophisticated dimensions, adaptive-pragmatic and reflective teaching, were absent in the PTs’ experienced-based conceptions. Finally, suggestions are offered for educators who considerably fluctuate the PTs’ experiential cognition of the instruction and related conceptions of enacted teaching.