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The purpose of the School of Thought is to help us question all schools of thought. We are a non profit dedicated to promoting critical thinking, reason and understanding by providing free Creative Commons educational materials using world's best practice design and code.

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TED TALK: How To Think, not What to Think

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TED TALK: How To Think, not What to Think

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How to think, not what to think | Jesse Richardson | TEDxBrisbane

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Using Webb's Depth of Knowledge to Increase Rigor

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Using Webb's Depth of Knowledge to Increase Rigor

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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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6 creative ways to use questions in the classroom

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6 creative ways to use questions in the classroom

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6 creative ways to use questions in the classroom

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Teachers share ideas for how questions can be effectively used to engage students and check they've absorbed information

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10 effective ways to improve your questioning in the classroom

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10 effective ways to improve your questioning in the classroom

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Alex Quigley explores how you can improve questioning in the classroom, by creating a 'culture of inquiry' that opens the minds of your students and provokes truly independent thought.

1. 'Questioning Monitor'

Involve students in the evaluation and reflection of the classroom questioning process by choosing a monitor to be responsible for tracking how many questions are: teacher or student, open or closed, factual or conceptual.

This shows students that you want to improve the quality of your questioning and that of theirs too.

These questions can be really useful for formative assessment as they mean the lesson can be taken in at least two different directions, depending on how well the students understand what has been taught so far.

These six steps of questioning, inspired by Greek philosopher Socrates, will create a critical atmosphere in your classroom that probes thinking and gets students questioning in a structured way. See details of each step here.

Initiate deeper thinking by asking seemingly simple questions that open up a complex array of higher order thinking.

Alex's examples of a thunk include: "If I ask if I can steal your pen and you say yes, is that stealing?" and "Can I ever step on the same beach twice?"

Initiate thinking and group discussion that engages students in their prospective learning by starting the lesson with one question that gets them thinking about what they're going to learn.

Spark the inquisitiveness of your students by reversing the standard question and answer dichotomy.

Encourage your students to work collaboratively in groups to create an array of quality questions then give them a series of challenging question stems to broaden their range of questions. Stems include: 'What if...?', 'Suppose we knew...?' and 'What would change if...?'

First pose a question to the class, pause, pounce on one student for an answer and then bounce that student's response to another student.

Ensure you give sufficient time at the 'pause' point, as research has shown that the quality of responses and the confidence levels of students increase with even a short amount of thinking time.

9. 'Question Continuum'

In pairs or groups, students devise questions on a given topic.
Next, a visible continuum is created, either on the whiteboard or a display board.

A horizontal axis indicates the 'Interest Level' generated by each question, showing how likely the question is to inspire new thinking and possibilities.

The vertical axis can perhaps represent 'Complexity' e.g. how far the question deepens understanding and general complex thinking.

10. 'The Question Wall'

Similar to the 'Question Continuum'; give students post it notes to write their questions on and display them visibly. Asking students to commit questions to writing typically eliminates any that reflect a sense of 'learnt helplessness' e.g. 'how do you spell...?' when there is a dictionary on the table.

To see complete explanations of all of the above, visit Alex's original post on questioning in the classroom.

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10 effective ways to improve your questioning in the classroom

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Alex Quigley explores how you can improve questioning in the classroom, by creating a 'culture of inquiry' that opens the minds of your students and provokes truly independent thought. 1. 'Questioning Monitor' Involve students in the evaluation and reflection of the classroom questioning process by choosing a monitor to be responsible for tracking how many questions are: teacher or student, open or closed, factual or conceptual.

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Tips from Teachers: Improving on the ‘Questioning’ Indicator

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Tips from Teachers: Improving on the ‘Questioning’ Indicator

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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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Three Steps for Improving Teacher Questions

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Three Steps for Improving Teacher Questions

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According to Robert Marzano's book, Classroom Instruction that Works, 80 percent of what is considered instruction involves asking questions. It makes sense then, that if we want to improve our effectiveness at teaching, of course we would start by improving our questions. I have thought a lot about this topic and I would like to share three specific actions that we can take to improve our questions. To begin with, we need to get students talking rather than the teacher talking. Second, prepare the questions when you plan the lesson. And third, scaffold the questions.

Step One

The first action for improvement in reality is not an action, but a shift in thinking about our own concept of teaching. We have to stop thinking that when we get in front of students, we will be able to get into the groove of a "discussion" by simply asking a few poignant questions. Let me explain. Some teachers may be tempted to believe that they are "teaching" when they are engaging students in a "class" discussion by asking a series of questions to lead students to a certain way of thinking. This type of teacher-student interaction really is not a "discussion." Students are not providing their opinions or evidence, nor does the teacher really want conjecture. The teacher typically is fishing for the "right answer" and is trying to draw it out of the students by asking leading questions. True discussion occurs where there is no "leader." There is give-and-take from everyone that involves conjecture, deduction, argument, proofs, and logical conclusions. Most importantly, in a true discussion, the outcome of the discussion is not known beforehand but is discovered through the discussion process.

After understanding this definition of a true discussion, trying to "lead" a class discussion is a waste of effort and time, primarily because "leading" destroys the exploratory purpose of the "discussion", but also because the number of students that are able to participate in a whole-class discussion is limited to just a few. I think you know where I am going with this: Instead of "leading" a discussion, why not teach your students how to discuss and break your class up into groups of four or five students, so they can then discuss the issues. This is much more productive than having 30 or more students listening to just a few talk with the teacher.

Step Two

The next move is to prepare the questions you want to ask as an integral part of the lesson. If questions are not prepared in advance, most the questions you ask or provide for the students will be knowledge and comprehension questions because it is extremely difficult to create higher order thinking questions "on-the-fly." The purpose for these questions is to "check for understanding" and to engage thinking skills, but remember that "whole-class" questions, as discussed above, have limited utility. If you provide the questions to the students in a PowerPoint, once again, you can divide the class into groups of four or five students and you have them all answer the questions at the same time orally.

Certainly students cannot answer questions or discuss something of which they know nothing. Savvy teacher will design learning activities in preparation for student-led discussions that will give students background knowledge, evidence, and ammunition to argue a point. The ELA strand of the Common Core State Standards encourages teachers to help students identify opinion and utilize evidence to support their argument -- the point of argument being to convince rather than to simply expound both sides of an issue.

Step Three

The final way to improve our use of questions is to design the questions so that they scaffold from cognitive difficulty levels of easy to hard. An effective way to do this is to create a spreadsheet with a column for containing a row for each concept and three additional columns (Knowledge/Comprehension, Application/Analysis, Synthesis/Evaluation) where you write several questions for each column for each concept. If you do this as you plan your lesson, you will have questions for building a vocabulary foundation of the concepts, questions for helping students relate the new knowledge to what they know already, and questions to help students establish the value of this knowledge (this also creates a handy question bank for assessing student knowledge).

An interesting thing about scaffolding questions is that it allows repetition without being repetitive. Each time you lead the students to a different level of question on a topic, students have the opportunity to revisit what they know, and use it in a different way. This helps students to remember and at the same time it keeps them engaged because you are not simply repeating the same question. Even though it is the same topic, it is new. Again, whole-class questioning value is limited, and students in small groups, answering all the questions from easy to hard, is a much more effective way to engage all students.

If teachers spend so much time asking students questions, then an easy way to improve student learning is to improve the way we ask the questions. What interesting ways have you found to engage more students and ask more effective questions?

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Three Steps for Improving Teacher Questions | Edutopia

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According to Robert Marzano's book, Classroom Instruction that Works, 80 percent of what is considered instruction involves asking questions. It makes sense then, that if we want to improve our effectiveness at teaching, of course we would start by improving our questions.

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8 Strategies To Help Students Ask Great Questions

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8 Strategies To Help Students Ask Great Questions

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by Terry Heick

Questions can be extraordinary learning tools.

A good question can open minds, shift paradigms, and force the uncomfortable but transformational cognitive dissonance that can help create thinkers. In education, we tend to value a student's ability to answer our questions. But what might be more important is their ability to ask their own great questions-and more critically, their willingness to do so.

The latter is a topic for another day, but the former is why we're here. This is part 2 of a short series (can two articles be considered a series?) built around the idea about how to ask great questions as learning tools. Part 1 'An Updated Guide For Questioning In The Classroom.'

8 Strategies To Help Students Ask Great Questions
1. TeachThought Learning Taxonomy

The TeachThought Learning Taxonomy is a template for critical thinking that frames cognition across six categories.

It imagines any learning product, goal, or objective as a 'thing,' (i.e.g, a subject of some kind) then suggests different ways to think about said 'thing'-mitosis, a math formula, an historical figure, a poem, a poet, a computer coding language, a political concept, a literary device, etc. It's designed to promote 'whole' thinking about otherwise discrete or disconnected ideas.

1. Function-thinking critically about how a 'thing' works

2. Self-Making sense of how the thinker relates to the 'thing'

3. Abstraction-Thinking about the 'thing' creatively, or in non-traditional ways

4. Parts-Seeing the individual parts of the 'thing'

5. Interdependence-Examining how the 'thing' relates to other (similar and non-similar) things

6. Whole-See the 'thing' fully and within context

A literary device-a metaphor example, is usually studied in isolation. This writer uses this metaphor in this way to this effect. Using the TeachThought Learning Taxonomy, a learner would be forced to confront that metaphor in much more diverse cognitive terrain-to think about something in multiple ways for a more complete picture and advanced understanding.

Function -Communicate the metaphor's most ideal utility (how it can and should be used, and why).

Self--Identity what you do and don't understand about the metaphor

Abstraction -Design a 'sequel' of the metaphor (not a simile-an extended metaphor would be a good start)

This framework can be used not only as a planning or assessment tool, but to promote students in self-directed learning and self-created questioning and examination. In short, they can use this framework (or a simplified version of it) to create their own questions. Some examples?
Prompt: Parts-Give examples and non-examples Questions: What are 3 examples and non-examples of mammals? What are 5 examples of push-pull factors? What are 3 non-examples of mixed fractions? Prompt: Interdependence-Direct others in using it Questions: How do-or might-others use alternative fuel sources to help create fresh water sources?
Prompt: Explain it differently to a novice or an expert
Questions: How would explain the Pythagorean Theorem differently to a 2nd grader and a college freshman? What would the main difference be?
The downside to using the TeachThought Learning Taxonomy to help students ask their own questions is the relative complexity of the framework, and the extra step of converting prompts to questions. Therefore, it's better suited to late middle school-university settings.

The upside? It can be used in any content area to think deeply about almost anything.
2. Digital Taxonomy Power Verbs
'Power verbs' aren't exclusive to Bloom's Taxonomy (see below). In addition to our TeachThought Learning Taxonomy (see above), there are 'verbs' that describe cognitive 'actions.' Add some kind of framework or hierarchy, and you've got a full 'taxonomy.'

Enter the 'digital taxonomy' power verbs. You can download a ready-for-the-classroom curricula version of our power verbs here, but you can do plenty with digital taxonomy power verbs to help students ask great questions without spending a penny. From designing projects and refining assessments to classroom, discussions and digital citizenship lessons, the 'actions'of students are among the most critical components of any learning experience.
3. Socratic Discussion
A Socratic Discussion, which is also referred to as a Socratic Seminar, is a group learning strategy designed to support students in open-ended examination and extended critical thinking through dialogic terms. In short, students learn together by talking together in an open and student-centered format. These discussions are not teacher-led, but student-led-students talk to one another.

It is a dialectal method of learning inspired by Socrates' iconic teaching methods that depend on a pattern of theory formation, revision, and elimination to arrive at loosely-held "truths." Used strategically, this approach should promote inquiry as learning and the close examination of one's own beliefs as primary catalysts for learning.
4. Paideia Seminar
A Paideia Seminar is similar to the Socratic Seminar-in fact, it uses Socratic Discussions on the part of the students, combined with a minor but clear role for teachers, to facilitate verbal and critical examination of ideas. From the (a?) Paideia Seminar website, "The Paideia Seminar is an integrated literacy event built around formal whole-class dialogue. The purpose for doing Paideia Seminar is to support students' ability to think conceptually and communicate collaboratively."

One of the key differences between a Paideia Seminar and a Socratic Seminar is that within the Paideia format, teachers are "allowed" a role, provided that that role doesn't exceed 10% of the total discussion. You can see a video here to learn more.
5. The Question Game

The Question Game focuses on "teaching children a kind of thinking which is particularly useful in creative problem-solving-a focused approach to get from a problem to the most effective solution. It is most effective when combined with regular repetition, which solidifies the thought pattern, and with groups, which encourages contributory exploration of alternative responses and creativity."

Its dice-form not only offers a whiz-bang manipulative, but also introduces a level of gamification and playful uncertainty into the process, and its open-ended and universal stems make it practical for a wide variety of classroom applications.
6. Bloom's Taxonomy
Similar to the TeachThought Taxonomy, Bloom's Taxonomy can act as a framework or pattern to funnel content, inquiry, or other learning processes. These use of the taxonomy to create universal stems is one approach as modeled in the following graphic from flickr user enokson.

7. Question Formulation Technique
We'll have more on this soon but in short, the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) is a kind of question brainstorming process based around a topic as a kind of kernel.

In their words of the Right Question Institute, QFT is "straightforward, rigorous process that helps all students learn how to produce their own questions, improve their questions, and strategize on how to use their questions. In the process, they develop divergent, convergent and metacognitive thinking abilities."

For now, you can read more about the QFT here.
8. Question Stems
As seen in the Bloom's graphic, sentence stems and question stems are wonderful tools that can empower students to ask questions by giving them a head-start in doing so.

By using a 'stem,' a teacher has set the ball on the proverbial tee for the student to smash. Yes, ideally the student asks their own great questions, but what if they can't-or don't think they can? What if they don't? What if they're still learning how? What if they lack the background knowledge in some narrow sect of science or math or whatever, and need a push in the back? Stems can help.

See also 26 Sentence Stems For Higher-Level Conversation In The Classroom

Question stems are a more elementary questioning strategy than the Question Formation Technique (see above), but not necessarily less effective. They can be used for younger students, students struggling with a concept, or even "advanced learners" (not a huge fan of this term) as they narrow an open-ended learning experience, or to be used as 'bread crumbs' in the case that the teacher is trying to help them arrive at a pre-determined destination. Some examples?

8 Basic Question Stem Examples

Which differences between ____ and ____ stand out to you?

Why does____never seem to____?

How does_____impact____?

How does _____ work?

What's most important about?

What's most simple/complex about ______?

How could you classify____? (And 'Why would you classify____?')

When____, why does____?
8 Strategies To Help Students Ask Great Questions; image attribution flickr user enokson

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8 Strategies To Help Students Ask Great Questions

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A good question can open minds, shift paradigms, and force the uncomfortable. Here are strategies to help students ask great questions.