A learning walk is not a mini-inspection. It is an enquiry. You choose a single focus, visit several classrooms, and look for patterns in practice — not to judge individual teachers, but to understand what is happening across a department, a stage, or a school.

Questioning is one of the most powerful foci for a learning walk because it is observable, it varies enormously between classrooms, and the research evidence on what constitutes effective questioning is strong enough to anchor the conversation afterwards. This guide walks through the process from start to finish.

Why questioning

Robin Alexander's dialogic teaching research — trialled through an Education Endowment Foundation RCT in 2017 — found that a structured focus on classroom talk produced two months' additional progress in just 20 weeks. The trial didn't introduce new curriculum content. It changed how teachers and pupils talked to each other. That is what a questioning-focused learning walk investigates: not whether teachers ask questions (they all do), but what kind of questions, directed at whom, with what wait time, and what happens after the first answer.

The research converges from three traditions. Alexander's dialogic teaching framework identifies five types of classroom talk — rote, recitation, instruction, discussion, and dialogue — and finds that most classrooms are stuck in recitation mode: closed question, short answer, teacher evaluates, next question. Mary Budd Rowe's wait time research, first published in 1974 and replicated extensively since, shows that extending the pause after a question from under one second to three or more seconds transforms the quality and length of pupil responses. Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion taxonomy operationalises techniques like Cold Call (selecting non-volunteers) and No Opt Out (returning to a pupil who couldn't answer) as observable, nameable practices.

Between them, these three bodies of work give you a concrete observation framework: not "was the questioning good?" but "what specifically did I see, and what does the research say about its likely impact?"

Before the walk

Choose your classrooms

Five is the right number. Fewer than five and you don't have enough variation to see a pattern. More than five and the walk takes too long — you need to be in each room for long enough to see at least two or three questioning exchanges, which means eight to ten minutes per classroom.

Choose classrooms that give you useful comparison. If your school improvement priority is questioning across the BGE, visit five different S1–S3 classes across different departments. If your focus is a specific department, visit five teachers within that department. The pattern you're looking for is cross-classroom, not within a single lesson.

Tell the teachers in advance. Not what you'll be looking for — that changes behaviour — but that you'll be visiting briefly as part of a learning walk. This is professional courtesy, not Hawthorne management. Springing unannounced visits on teachers poisons the culture around observation faster than any other decision a school leader can make.

Know what you're looking for

This is the most important step. A learning walk without a clear observation framework produces hunches, not evidence. You need to know, before you enter the first room, exactly which practices you're observing and what the descriptors look like.

For a questioning-focused walk, you are observing five practices:

Open questioning — Is the teacher asking questions with genuine inquiry (no single predetermined answer, inviting thinking) or closed recall questions (testing memory of a fact)? Watch for the hybrid pattern: a teacher who starts with a closed question but immediately probes with "why" or "how do you know," turning recitation into dialogue.

Cold calling and question distribution — Is the teacher selecting non-volunteers, or relying on hands-up? Are the same three or four pupils answering every question? Look specifically for whether the teacher has a system for distributing questions — calling on pupils who haven't volunteered, using a seating plan, or employing No Opt Out (returning to a pupil who couldn't answer after hearing it from someone else).

Wait time — Count the seconds between the teacher posing a question and accepting a response. The research threshold is three seconds. Most teachers wait less than one. Also watch for wait time after a pupil responds — the pause before the teacher evaluates or moves on, which gives the rest of the class time to process the answer.

Probing and follow-up — When a pupil answers, what does the teacher do? The weakest pattern is accepting the first answer and moving on. The strongest is uptake — incorporating the pupil's exact words into the next question ("You said the character was angry — what evidence in the text supports that?"). Between these: "Why do you think that?", building on the response to generate the next question, and redirecting to peers ("Does anyone agree or disagree?").

Pupil-to-pupil dialogue — Is there structured talk happening? Think-pair-share with all three phases (think time, pair discussion, share), or are pupils only speaking when directly asked by the teacher? Look for whether pupils build on each other's contributions — Mercer's exploratory talk — or whether every exchange runs through the teacher.

Print these five practices with their descriptors on a single sheet. Carry it into every room. You are not trying to remember what to look for — you are using a framework that keeps your observations specific and comparable across classrooms.

During the walk

In each classroom

Arrive quietly. Position yourself where you can hear the teacher's questions and see the pupils' responses — usually at the side of the room, not the back. Do not interact with the lesson. You are an observer, not a participant.

Start recording as soon as you hear the first question. For each questioning exchange you observe, note:

• Which practice you saw (open questioning, cold calling, wait time, probing, pupil dialogue)
• Which specific descriptor matches what happened (genuine inquiry or closed recall? Cold call or hands-up? Three seconds or immediate?)
• When in your visit it occurred — early, mid, or late

You are not trying to capture everything. In eight to ten minutes you might see five to eight questioning exchanges. Record each one with a practice and a descriptor. That is enough.

What to resist: the temptation to form a judgement about the teacher's overall questioning quality. You are collecting evidence, not evaluating. The judgement comes later, when you see the pattern across five rooms.

Between classrooms

Take thirty seconds in the corridor. Review what you just recorded. Note anything that surprised you — a technique you hadn't expected, or an absence that felt significant. Then clear your mind and enter the next room fresh. Each classroom should be observed on its own terms, not against the one you just left.

After the walk

Aggregate the evidence

Lay out your evidence from all five classrooms side by side. You are looking for patterns, not outliers. The questions to ask:

What was the dominant questioning type across the five rooms? If four out of five classrooms showed closed recall questions with hands-up only, that is a pattern — and it tells you something about the department or school's default questioning culture, not about individual teachers.

Where was the variation? If one classroom showed genuine inquiry with cold calling and three-second wait time while the other four showed recitation, that variation is information. What was different about that room? The subject? The teacher's experience? The age of the pupils? The answer might suggest where to look for good practice to share.

What was absent? Sometimes the most important finding is what you didn't see. If no classroom showed probing follow-up questions — if every teacher accepted the first answer and moved on — that is a school-wide development need that no individual observation would have revealed.

Did the pattern change within lessons? If questioning was stronger during teacher input (structured questions to check understanding) and weaker during independent work (no questioning at all), that suggests teachers have questioning skills but deploy them narrowly. The development conversation is about transfer, not about learning new techniques.

Prepare for the feedback conversation

A learning walk does not produce individual teacher feedback. It produces a collective evidence picture that becomes the basis for professional dialogue — with the department, with the school improvement team, or with the staff.

Frame the findings as evidence, not as grades. "Across the five classrooms, we observed questioning 32 times. 24 were closed recall questions. 6 were open questions with genuine inquiry. Wait time of three or more seconds was observed twice. No classroom showed structured pupil-to-pupil dialogue." That is a factual summary. It doesn't name individuals. It doesn't assign blame. It describes what is happening — and it creates the space for a professional conversation about what could happen differently.

The qualifier descriptors do the work here. Telling a department "questioning needs to improve" is vague and demoralising. Telling a department "we saw a lot of closed recall questioning and very little wait time — the research says extending the pause to three seconds changes the quality of responses, and we saw exactly that in one classroom" is specific, evidence-based, and actionable. It gives the department something concrete to try, and it names the colleague who is already doing it well.

Connect to development

The learning walk is the beginning of a cycle, not the end of it. The evidence you've gathered should feed into:

A focused professional learning session on the specific gap you identified. If wait time was the issue, run a 20-minute session where teachers practise extending the pause — with video examples, then in trios, then in their own classrooms over the following week.

A follow-up walk four to six weeks later, using the same framework, to see whether practice has shifted. This closes the loop: evidence → dialogue → development → evidence. Without the follow-up, the walk was an event. With it, it becomes part of an improvement process.

The school improvement plan, where questioning quality — evidenced by the walk data — becomes a tracked priority rather than an aspiration. The data from the walk gives you a baseline. The follow-up gives you a trajectory.

What this looks like with data

Imagine the aggregated evidence from a questioning-focused walk across five S2 classrooms in the Science department:

This section includes an interactive chart — open the page in a browser to explore it.

That table tells a clear story. The Science department's questioning culture is dominated by closed recall with hands-up, insufficient wait time, and teacher-dominated exchanges. The research evidence is unambiguous about the impact of this pattern. But the table also tells you where to start: wait time is the simplest intervention (it requires no new resources, only a conscious pause), and one classroom is already doing it. That teacher becomes your in-house expert.

This is what a learning walk produces when the observation framework is specific enough to generate comparable data rather than anecdote. The framework makes the evidence comparable. The comparison makes the pattern visible. The pattern makes the development conversation productive.

Summary

1. Choose five classrooms that give you useful comparison
2. Use a clear framework: five questioning practices, each with specific descriptors
3. Record what you see — practice + descriptor + when — not what you think
4. Aggregate across rooms to find patterns, not to rank individuals
5. Frame findings as evidence and connect to a specific development step
6. Follow up in four to six weeks to close the cycle

A learning walk is ten minutes per room. Fifty minutes total. The evidence it produces — when the framework is right — can reshape a department's questioning culture over a term.

For schools working with the Ofsted framework

HGIOS4 and Ofsted's Education Inspection Framework (EIF) ask similar questions of questioning practice, though the language differs. HGIOS QI 2.3 ("Learning, Teaching and Assessment") examines quality of teaching — including questioning, dialogue and pupil engagement. Ofsted's EIF expects that "teachers check pupils' understanding systematically, identify misconceptions accurately and provide clear, direct feedback" (Quality of Education — Implementation).

The walk framework described here maps across directly:

A hands-up-only, closed-recall pattern is weak evidence against both frameworks. A culture of cold calling, wait time and uptake is strong evidence for both. The walk produces the same data in either inspection context.

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Jamie Scobie writes from extensive experience in Scottish secondary education, including pastoral care, data for improvement, and school self-evaluation. This guide is published independently: he writes in a personal capacity as the creator of Learning Lens, offering practical analysis alongside the work of building the product and reflecting on teaching, evidence, and policy. He speaks on this page only for himself and for Learning Lens, not for any employer or other organisation. He holds an MSt from Cambridge (Distinction) and a Masters from Stirling.