It’s not just in limiting the amount of questions that you ask that you find control in your delivery. It’s like a pitcher in baseball who, if she lacks control, cannot win the game because she will walk everybody….
Now control involves the classroom managament piece, of course, and in particular command of Classroom Rule #2 as well as the particular way Tina shows us how to confront kids in class at level #3 of our classroom management plan. But it also involves how slowly we speak.?One of a pitcher’s “bread and butter” pitches in baseball – to stretch the baseball metaphor possibly more than it wants to be stretched – is called a change-up pitch. It’s where you move your arm as you do when throwing a regular fast ball or curve while slowing the speed of the pitch down considerably, from 95 mph to around 78 mph.?How does this relate to gaining control of your questioning in your CI classrooms? It is because mastery in questioning in a CI class is “slowed-down questioning”. ?In baseball if the batter knows that a change up is coming, she can really tee off on it. (Batters don’t know that in baseball but they should be able to tee off on our every pitch/question in our classrooms – they should understand everything we say and it is on us if they don’t.)?So ask fewer questions, be all over the classroom management piece in the way Tina and I talked about it last summer in the workshops, but also remember to put lots of space between your questions besides just asking fewer of them in class. Pitch is so that they can hit it.