How to deal with difficult questions from your students

For both new teachers with a shiny certificate in hand or teachers with years of experience, it’s likely that at some point you’ll come up against a question you just don’t know the answer to. Whether it’s a grammar question you have no explanation for or a nosy personal query you’re not comfortable answering in front of 15 staring teenagers, we’ll cover our top tips for dealing with difficult questions. Thanks to all the contributors on Twitter who gave us their ideas.

#1 Dealing with grammar or lexical questions

You can’t be expected to know everything, so first of all, don’t feel embarrassed or awkward if a question comes up that you can’t answer off the bat. Importantly, don’t make up an answer if you’ve got no idea! The other thing to avoid is simply bamboozling your students with terminology that they won’t understand to make it look like you know what you’re talking about. If your students ask a question, it’s likely because they’re curious or interested in discovering the answer, so they’ll need to be able to understand it!

Here are some things you can do:

• Try to find out the answer by the end of lesson. You can have a quick search online or in a reference book while your students are doing a reading or listening task, for example.
• If you have a break in the lesson, ask your colleagues in the staffroom if they have any idea what the answer is.
• Tell your students that you’ll write it down, look it up and explain the answer properly in the next lesson. If you feel this is a bit of a cop out, you can frame this as, ‘I want to research this first to make sure that I’m giving you the best possible answer’. And try not to forget (although if you only see the group once a week, this is easier said than done!).
• Try and find the answer together in the lesson. Depending on the environment, you could ask students to use their mobile phones to find the answer or go to the school computer room or library to try and find it.
• Ask for some more context. If the student heard a phrase or structure and you’re unsure what they mean, asking where they heard or saw it might give you some clues as to what exactly they mean.
• If you find the answer before the lesson, you could send the class some information by email (or through a learning platform like Edmodo if you use it). This is particularly nice if you have a high-level class and you find an article or explanation that they can read and digest themselves.

#2 Dealing with inappropriate or personal questions

There might be times in the classroom that students ask questions that you don’t want to answer. These could be personal questions about your life outside the classroom or they could be questions that you don’t feel comfortable answering as perhaps they’d be better for the child’s parents to answer (e.g. Is Father Christmas real? Where do babies come from?). You also might feel the student is really pushing their luck – and you don’t want to encourage them.

Here are some ways for you to deal with this:

• Give some indication that you’ve heard the question but don’t want to answer. For example, “I appreciate that you’re interested in me but that’s a bit too personal so I’m not going to answer it.”
• Make it clear that you’ve got a lesson plan and you don’t have time to stray from it: “That’s not relevant to the lesson and I don’t want us to get distracted today as we have a lot of things to get through.”
• Re-establish some of the boundaries – you’re not friends. If you have young learners, it might be worth including something about personal questions in your list of rules at the start of term.
• Use the question as an opportunity to introduce some language that the students could use if they were asked something they didn’t want to answer. This reinforces the idea that it’s OK not to answer everything you’re asked if you don’t want to.

There are a few key things to take away. Firstly, it’s OK not to know the answers to everything your students ask. It’s also an excellent opportunity to show your students that it’s alright if they don’t know everything too. You can teach them a little more autonomy by getting them to find out the answers themselves. You can also introduce some language they can use if they don’t know the answer or don’t want to answer the question too.

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We hope this blog has been useful to you! If you enjoyed this, you may also like: The beginner’s guide to discipline techniques in the TEFL classroom.