Affective Questions

Learning Activity

Affective questions allow for incidents to become learning opportunities.  Through the process of affective questioning, students learn empathetic reasoning and are more able to find resolve minimizing the potential for future occurrences.  Affective questions are an opportunity for students to communicate what happened, recognize the affect their behavior has had on another and come up with ways to solve their problem.  Through affective questioning, the responsibility for finding resolve is the student's.  

Sample questions:

• What happened?
• How did it make you feel?
• Now that you realize (student) felt that way, what do you think you can do to fix it (make it right)?
• What do you think we need to do to ensure this does not happen again?
• In the future, what do you think you could do differently to ensure this does not happen again?

After reviewing the resources, how do you think you can incorporate affective questions in your daily communication with students? Answer the questions below as evidence.

Resources

Affective Questions - Small Impromptu Conference - This handout is from wishschools.org.  It is adapted From: “Developing Capable Young People” from the book Raising Self-Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World by Stephen Glenn and Jane Nelson.

This video shows us how using affective questions allows for students to engage with learning on a more personal level by expressing their attitudes, feelings, and values toward a specific topic.

In this video from Santa Ana Unified School District, a teacher uses both affective statements and affective questions to facilitate the restorative process, "Impromptu Conversation", with a student.