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Student inquiry is at the heart of student choice. When students are able to ask their own questions, they can chase their curiosity and tap into their own interests. They can build on their prior knowledge and build a bridge to new information that they are analyzing. But how do we actually do this?

I want classrooms to be bastions of creativity and wonder. I want to see students chasing their curiosity and researching answers. I love what happens when students solve problems that don't have easy answers; when they become builders and engineers and authors and scientists and historians bent on finding out the truth. And yet, this doesn't always happen in school. Often, we stick too tightly to curriculum maps and deadlines and students learn to value compliance above empowerment. And the result is a lack of natural curiosity.

About a year ago, I talked to a teacher-librarian named Glenn Warren. We've had a couple of great Google Hangouts and I highly respect his ideas on information literacy. He described what happened to students at various grade levels when he first introduced to the Ask Tons of Questions face of design thinking. The kindergartners asked so many questions, they couldn't write every question down. By fourth grade, they were asking 3-4 questions. By middle school, they wanted to know if their questions were the "right" questions. They're really focused on compliance and not curiosity.

I find this tragic.

My friend George Couros describes it this way, "If students leave school less curious than when they have started we have failed them."

In many respects, the system has failed our systems. But that's why teachers are the ones who can turn things around.

This is the core idea of inquiry-based learning:

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We want to see kids asking tons of questions. This is how students grow into creative, critical thinkers. In an inquiry-based framework, it all begins with student questions. But how do we actually make that happen? The answer lies in a culture of inquiry. This includes everything from the trust that teachers develop to the way they reduce fear to the lessons they develop to the strategies they use.

1. Question everything. Make this your mantra! As long as a question is respectful, allow your students to question their world. This applies to analyzing mathematical processes, thinking through social issues, making sense out of a text or analyzing the natural world for cause and effect. Every lesson should include students asking questions to you, to one another or to themselves. You can even move beyond the classroom and encourage students to ask questions of the world through social media and personal interviews with experts in the field.

2. Launch a Wonder Week. Take 3-5 school days to do a Wonder Week Project. Here, students chase their own curiosity and engage in research to find the answers. In the end, they share their learning through a multimedia presentation. It's short and simple but it gives students a chance to own the inquiry process. The idea is that they can answer whatever question they want and share their answer with an authentic audience. If a Wonder Week takes too long, you can do a Wonder Day. These are great on those "throw away" days when you have fire drills, assemblies, and testing that derail your schedule. After practicing this a few times, students should be able to internalize the process and the Wonder Days become a great option when you have a substitute teacher.

3. Give feedback on questions. Have students highlight one another's questions in Google Docs and leave comments on their blogs with very specific feedback. Now, this might sound harsh to criticize questions, but it doesn't have to be. When all questions are being analyzed, students learn that critical feedback is helpful. They begin to critique each other in a way that is helpful and positive by saying things like, "This question is deep, but it's worded in a way that elicits a short answer response. Can you change it so that you draw a longer response?"

4. Model the process. In the first week of school, I model the types of questions that require deeper thinking. This is something I do with graduate students where I teach and something I used to do with middle school students. You can do this during read-alouds as well as class discussions. You can model this as a problem-solving strategy in math or during an experiment in science. If you're up for it, you can ask a bad question and follow it up by asking your students, "Why was this question awful?" Or when a student asks a great question, you can say, "Why was that a hard question to answer? Why did it make the class think deeper?" The goal is to get them to get students engaged in metacognition.

5. Practice it often. I've had success with students doing mock interviews, fake press conferences, and rotating discussion zones. In these moments, they get the opportunity to practice the process of asking questions. This is a chance to make questions a part of the daily culture of the classroom. In math, they can ask questions about processes and problem-solving. They can ask diagnostic questions in order to figure out where they went wrong. In a social studies class, they might ask conceptual questions, theoretical questions, and questions that bring about multiple viewpoints and theories.

6. Spend more time playing. Wonder is both something we can promote in schools but also something we can allow - and the best way we allow this to happen is by promoting play. I find it sad that students often get blocks of play time only when they are younger but as they get older, it stops.Is it any wonder that younger kids are more likely to ask random questions?Include blocks of time in your day to allow students to play, explore, and discover. I sometimes look back and cringe at those moments when I stopped creative play in my classroom, even though it was leading to curiosity. I jumped to conclusions about students being off-task and I even shamed kids or lashed out at a class and then had to come back and apologize. But on my best days, our culture of play led to a culture of curiosity. This relaxed nature actually led to deeper thinking and better work.

7. Provide support. Some students have a really hard time with questioning strategies. Providing sentence stems gives them a starting point. At first, I didn't like the idea of helping students form their questions. It felt artificial. I thought that students would (and should) naturally ask questions and grow through accessing prior knowledge. Over time, I realized that some students struggled with how to ask questions. Sometimes, they struggle with the language. Other times, they have a hard time with critical thinking. When you provide scaffolding, you are making the thinking visible for students and giving them concrete examples that they can use as they engage in inquiry.

8. Explain and model the different types of questions. The idea here to teach students about clarifying, critical thinking and inferencing questioning. Often the process is messy and there are moments of overlap, but it helps students to have a general framework of the types of questions that exist. Eventually, it becomes second nature as they ask, "What needs to be clarified?" or "How does this idea relate to that concept?" or "Why is it that _______?" or "What am I not seeing here that I should be seeing?" From there, they can develop better questions. If you download the free design thinking toolkit at the bottom of this post, you'll see a suite of assessment tools that includes sample questions that students can use.

9. Embrace student choice. It would be hard for me to generate questions about cars (not the movie Cars, because I have three kids and I have seen that movie hundreds of times) because I don't really care about cars. Yeah, yeah, I get it. There's a difference between a Mustang and a Lamborghini, but the only real difference I could identify is that one of them is easier to spell. For me, a car is a giant hunk of metal that gets you from place to place. But to someone who loves cars, each car is a work of art. And a student who is into cars will have an easy time creating tons of questions about cars. This is why I love Genius Hour projects. Students can engage in inquiry by tapping into their own prior knowledge. Notice here that the more you know about a subject, the more likely you are to ask questions. Knowledge should make you more curious, not less. I've never seen a cosmologist say, "I'm done asking questions about the universe." It doesn't happen.

10. Use multiple grouping options. Encourage students to ask questions of the teacher, of their partners, in their small groups, and of themselves. Give students time to think and process and ultimately ask better questions. So, when students read an article summary, they start with individual questions but eventually move into small group discussions and a whole class Socratic Seminar. This constant integration of multiple grouping creates a climate where we are always asking questions.

11. Slow down. I remember as a child feeling a sense of amazement at the ability to pull iron out of sand. We pulled out magnets and stuck them in all kinds of soil until it worked. The process was slow. We weren't hurried. But this was precisely what led to questions. Often, these relaxed moments of wonder are precisely what students need to ask deeper inquiry questions. If we want a culture of wonder, we need to slow down.

12. Follow rabbit trails. When I was a pre-service teacher, my mentor Brad said something so often it became a mantra for me. "We must seize the moment of excited curiosity for the acquisition of wisdom." Brad would say this all the time and slowly I memorized it and internalized it. He wasn't sure where the saying originally came from, but the idea was that in that single moment when your curiosity is sparked, you should chase it. If you put it off until later, you miss something in the process. Those questions evaporate. But when you chase the curiosity in the moment, you end up asking better questions and learning more in the process. Yes, there's a time for deadlines and it's true that we sometimes need to get back on task. But there's a place for going off-road and wandering in wonder.

13. Share your own questions. A teacher's naturally curiosity infects the entire classroom in a really positive way. As a student, I loved to hear my teachers say, "Yeah, I'm trying to figure out __________" or "I've been exploring ___________." Their curiosity meant that it was okay for me to be curious; that being geeky was a positive thinking. You can give your students that same gift: the permission to wonder. When you talk about your own curiosity and you share the questions you have, you create a class culture that values inquiry.

14. Reduce the fear. Often when a student says, "I don't know what to ask," what they're really saying is, "I'm afraid of sounding stupid." If students have had to spend most of their time getting the questions right, it can feel unnerving to be told that they can now ask their own questions. One way to model this is through admitting that you don't have all the answers. It can be powerful when students here you say, "I don't know. Let's find out." When this happens, students realize that they have the permission to ask questions and admit that they don't have all the answers.

This is not a comprehensive list. I'm sure there are many other ways to help students recover their natural curiosity. Sometimes it involves going out into nature. Sometimes they just need a Genius Hour, where they can pursue their passions. But ultimately, teachers can create an environment of curiosity, where students are excited about asking questions and discovering answers.

Please leave your email address below and click the yellow subscribe button to receive the free inquiry-based Wonder Day / Wonder Week project. It includes the process and the handout you can use with students. I will also send you a weekly email with free, members-only access to my latest blog posts, videos, podcasts and resources to help you boost creativity and spark innovation in your classroom.

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How to Help Students Ask Better Questions by Creating a Culture of Inquiry

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Student inquiry is at the heart of student choice. When students are able to ask their own questions, they can chase their curiosity and tap into their own interests. They can build on their prior knowledge and build a bridge to new information that they are analyzing.

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Inquiry-Based Learning: The Ultimate Guide

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What Kills Questioning? (Book trailer for A MORE BEAUTIFUL QUESTION by Warren Berger)

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Recently, I was looking through my bookshelves and discovered an entire shelf of instruction books that came with software I had previously purchased. Yes, there was a time when software was bought in stores, not downloaded. Upon closer examination of these instruction books, I noticed that many of them were for computers and software that I no longer use or even own. More importantly, most were still in shrink-wrap, never opened. I recalled that when I bought software, I just put the disk into the computer and never looked at the book.

I realized that I did the same when I bought a new car -- with one exception. I never read the instruction book in the glove compartment. I just turned on the engine and drove off. I already knew how to drive, so I didn't need a book. The exception occurred when I tried to set the clock. I couldn't figure it out, so I finally opened the glove compartment and checked the book.

This pattern was and is true for every device I buy. I never read the book that comes with a toaster, an iPod, or a juicer unless I have a question. There are some people who do read instruction books before using a device, but with no disrespect intended, those people are a small minority. Our minds are set up to not care about answers unless we have a question. The greater the question, the more compelling it is, the more we want the answer. We learn best when questions come before answers.

The Need to Know

Too many classrooms ignore this basic learning model. They spend most of class time providing information and then ask questions in the form of a quiz, test, or discussion. This is backward. Too many students never learn this way. It is simply too hard to understand, organize, interpret, or make sense out of information -- or even to care about it -- unless it answers a question that students care about.

Lessons, units, and topics are more motivating when they begin with a question whose answer students want to know. Not only do great questions generate interest, they also answer the question that so many students wonder about: "Why do I have to learn this?" Finally, great questions increase cognitive organization of the content by framing it into a meaningful answer to the opening question.

There is a catch, though, in using questions to begin your lesson. The question must be connected to the content, so that the following learning activities actually answer the question. The question must fit your students' age, ability, and experiences. In addition, the question needs to provoke both thought and curiosity. In fact, it must be compelling enough to generate so much motivation so that students can't help but want to know the answer.

Have you ever forgotten the name of a song and spent hours trying to remember it? It gets under your skin until you no longer want the answer -- you need it. That's what a great opening question does for students. Compulsion more than simple curiosity drives them to learn the information that follows. It's what I felt when I finally wanted to read my car manual so that I could set the clock.

10 Questions That Motivate Learning

Questions this powerful are hard to find. I suggest collecting as many as you can (5-10 per year, for example), and after weeding out the ones that didn't work, eventually you'll be able to fill a notebook or computer file with them. I have been collecting these kinds of questions from teachers for years. Here's a sample of some great ones that worked with students in creating enough motivation to drive an entire lesson.

Middle school math: What does Martin Luther King have in common with algebra? (Answer: Both are concerned with equality.)

First grade science class studying particles: What is the smallest thing you've ever held in your hand? (Warning: Do not use this question in high school.)

Upper-level history class studying the Pilgrims: Is there anything your parents could ever do to you that would make you run away from home?

Elementary art: If humans could be a color other than any of the colors that they already are, what color would they be? Why do you think this? Draw some people of this color.

High school English: If Hamlet were a television sitcom, what would be a better name for it?

Elementary English: What is the best name for a book about your life?

Geography: Why does Israel have more fertile soil than other Middle East countries that share the same desert? (Answer: It has more trees to hold in moisture.)

Second grade reading: We are going to redesign the alphabet. What three letters can be eliminated? (Answer: C, Q, X)

Eighth grade physical education: Why is a soccer ball harder to control inside the gym than on the field? (Answer: Friction)

Middle school English: Why don't good and food rhyme? Given the definition of best, can you have more than one best friend?

Each of these questions was used by teachers to begin lessons that really motivated their students. Can you add any more to the list?

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Questions Before Answers: What Drives a Great Lesson?

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Recently, I was looking through my bookshelves and discovered an entire shelf of instruction books that came with software I had previously purchased. Yes, there was a time when software was bought in stores, not downloaded. Upon closer examination of these instruction books, I noticed that many of them were for computers and software that I no longer use or even own.

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A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger

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Home Overview - A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger

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Journalist and speaker Warren Berger realized that the majority of successful creatives and entrepreneurs he was interviewing over the years were great questioners. His wondering about “How can we all learn to do what they do?” led to this website and the writing of his three beautiful questions boo…

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60 Second Book Brief: A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger

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Asking students to create their own questions has a powerful impact on learning. Plus, 5 tips to encourage high-quality questions.

You've seen a penny hundreds, if not thousands, of times. But can you draw one from memory?

In a famous decades-old study, adults were asked to draw a U.S. penny without any aids. Although they were confident that they knew what a penny looked like, their performance on the test was "remarkably poor." And when shown pennies with slightly different characteristics, such as misplaced text or with Lincoln's portrait facing the wrong direction, few were able to identify the inaccuracies.

It's a maddening quirk of human memory: We're often convinced that we know something, but upon closer examination, it's just an illusion. And this, of course, is no surprise to teachers, who often encounter students who overestimate how well they know a topic.

Understanding how people learn and reliably commit things to memory is what prompted psychology professor Mirjam Ebersbach and her colleagues at the University of Kassel to study how students prepare for an exam, and what strategies yielded the optimal improvements in student learning.

In a recent study, Ebersbach and her research team randomly assigned 82 university students to one of three groups. In the restudy group, students simply revisited and restudied the material from a lesson in their psychology course. In the testing group, students studied the material and then took a short 10-question quiz. In the last group, students studied the same material and then created their own probing questions.

One week later, all of the students took a test on the material. Students in the restudy group scored an average of 42 percent on the test, while students in the testing and generating questions groups both scored 56 percent-an improvement of 14 percentage points, or the equivalent of a full letter grade.

"Question generation promotes a deeper elaboration of the learning content," Ebersbach told Edutopia. "One has to reflect what one has learned and how an appropriate knowledge question can be inferred from this knowledge."

Stronger Memory Traces

Why is generating questions so effective? Past studies reveal that learning strategies that require additional cognitive effort- retrieval practice, elaboration, concept mapping, or drawing, for example-encourage students to process the material more deeply and consider it in new contexts, generating additional memory traces that aid retention.

Yet the most commonly used strategies are also the least effective. In the study, students filled out a survey identifying the learning strategies they typically used when studying for exams. By far, they said that taking notes and restudying were their go-to strategies-a surprisingly common finding that's been regularly reported in the research. Less than half as many mentioned practice tests, and only one student among 82 mentioned generating questions.

Passive strategies such as rereading or highlighting passages are "superficial" and may even impair long‐term retention, Ebersbach explained. "This superficial learning is promoted by the illusion of knowledge, which means that learners often have the impression after the reading of a text, for instance, that they got the messages. However, if they are asked questions related to the text (or are asked to generate questions relating to the text), they fail because they lack a deeper understanding," she told Edutopia.

That lasting "impression" of success makes it hard to convince people that rereading and underlining are, in fact, suboptimal approaches. They register the minor benefits as major improvements and hold fast to the strategies, even when the research reveals that we're wrong.

Getting Students to Generate Productive Questions in Class

While generating questions is an effective study strategy, it also can be adapted into a classroom activity, whether online or in person.

Here are five ideas to incorporate student-generated questions into your classroom.

Teach students how to ask good questions: At first, it can be difficult for students to generate their own questions, and many will start with simple yes/no or factual prompts. To encourage better questions, ask students to think about and focus on some of the tougher or more important concepts they encountered in the lesson, and then have them propose questions that start with "explain" or that use "how" and "why" framing. Direct your students to road-test their questions by answering them themselves: Do the questions lead to longer, more substantive answers, or can they be answered with a simple "yes" or "no"?

A bonus: Students who propose questions and then answer them to test their soundness are also relearning the materials more deeply themselves. Very sneaky.

Play Jeopardy!: Research shows that active learning strategies, such as using the format of the popular game show Jeopardy! to review concepts, not only boosts student engagement but also increases academic performance. You can involve students by asking them to write the questions themselves.

To create the game, specialized software isn't even necessary: The researchers in the study used the wiki feature in the class's learning management system to create a 6x5 table with each cell containing a question. Similarly, you can use PowerPoint or Google Slides to create the Jeopardy! game grid. Here's a handy template.

Have students create their own test and quiz questions: Is it cheating if students write the questions to the exam? In a 2014 study, researchers evaluated a strategy whereby students not only developed the learning materials for the class but also wrote a significant part of the exams. The result? A 10 percentage point increase in the final grade, attributed largely to an increase in student engagement and motivation. Popular tools like Kahoot and Quizlet are fun and convenient ways to create quizzes, no matter if your classroom is in person, hybrid, or virtual.

Improve class-wide discussions: In a 2018 study, students were asked to write questions based on Bloom's taxonomy; questions ranged from lower-order true/false and multiple-choice questions to challenging questions that required analysis and synthesis. The students not only enjoyed the exercise-many called it a "rewarding experience"-but also scored 7 percentage points higher on the final exam, compared with their peers in other classes.

Use some class time to identify the characteristics of higher-order questions; then collect student questions and discuss some of the more challenging ones as a group.

Get at 'driving questions': For Andrew Miller, a former high school teacher and current administrator at an international pre-K-12 school, taking a page out of project-based learning and asking students to create driving questions -such as "Why do leaves have different shapes?"-not only enhances their understanding of the topic but also "creates interest and a feeling of challenge" that can draw in even the most reluctant students.

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Using Student-Generated Questions to Promote Deeper Thinking

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Asking students to create their own questions has a powerful impact on learning. Plus, 5 tips to encourage high-quality questions.

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Share the Strategy and Source RQI Our materials are available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. To comply with this license, you must include the following language on all materials you use, share, adapt, or create: "Source: The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) was created by the Right Question Institute (rightquestion.org)." As long as you include this source language, you are welcome to use, adapt, and share our strategies and materials for noncommercial use. You may also create new materials that reference the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) and/or other Right Question Institute strategies as long as you include the source language above. If you are interested in sharing RQI's resources for commercial purposes you must contact us by selecting the "Permission for Use" option on the contact form.

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Share the Strategy and Source RQI Our materials are available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. To comply with this license, you must include the following language on all materials you use, share, adapt, or create: "Source: The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) was created by the Right Question Institute (rightquestion.org)."

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Stories For thinking

A selection of short stories told by our Specialists for National Storytelling Week 2018. Use them as a stimulus to run your own enquiries, and buy the books they are taken from at our shop.

Fancy learning to spin a yarn or weave a tale like our philosophers below? Sign up to our next Storytelling for Thinking course on our Eventbrite page.

"This was one of the best courses I've been on with The Philosophy Foundation. So much fun and so many ways to develop your storytelling."

Dr Jen Wright

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A selection of short stories told by our Specialists for National Storytelling Week 2018. Use them as a stimulus to run your own enquiries, and buy the books they are taken from at our shop. Fancy learning to spin a yarn or weave a tale like our philosophers below?