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by Irena Nayfeld, TeachThought PD Inquiry Workshop Facilitator

Those of us who spend our days around young children hear it all the time: "What's that?"

"Why are you doing that?"

Children are infinitely curious - they want to understand the world around them, how it all works, where it comes from, and how to interact with it. And yet, research shows that children ask few questions during instruction - and that this number keeps decreasing in later grades.

Why are questions pivotal for learning, and why should we as educators prioritize creating a classroom environment where inquiry thrives?

Always-On Inquiry: 5 Benefits Of Asking Questions In The Classroom

1. Questions Reveal Interest

We ask questions when something said catches our attention, surprises us, or when we hear something we want more information about. Asking almost any question is a clear signal that says "Hey! I am paying attention and I want to know more!"

Asking a great question? That's even more revealing.

2. Questions Reveal Gaps in-and Strength of-Understanding

As teachers, we know that not everything we say will be understood the first time. In fact, it makes our job a lot easier when we are asked a question that can clarify a misunderstanding or explain something in a better way.

Teaching students to ask effective questions can reveal what that child doesn't understand, giving us that chance to fill in the gaps and likely improve understanding for other students too.

Great questions reveal understanding and a overall grasp of significance in ways that answers cannot.

3. Questions Improve Recall

Research shows that when you ask a question yourself, you are more likely to remember the information you receive. It makes sense - you are likely asking about something that is interesting or relevant to you, and by asking the question you become personally invested in the answer.

Encouraging children to express their questions can help them generate information that interests them, and that they are more likely to hold on to after the lesson is over.

4. Questions Keep Learners Engaged

If we are open to children's questions and leave room for discussion, the lesson can quickly become more interesting when it is guided by the children's own questions and they get a lot of benefits of asking questions. A question can take a lesson in which the teacher is doing the talking to a discussion that is more relevant to the students, bringing up questions that others might have, and making students personally engaged in the topic or activity.

Questions need students.

5. Questions Build a Foundation For New Knowledge

Any subject or topic starts out with broad, foundational information that forms the basis for more in depth or specific knowledge. A basic understanding of how plants grow is essential to the discussion of how dessert plants differ from those growing in rain forests.

A question posed at the right time builds that essential knowledge - with that understanding, the more complex, more interesting knowledge has roots, and the learning keeps on building.

As educators, it is up to us harness young learners' natural curiosity and be purposeful about encouraging questions in our classroom so that children reap these benefits of asking questions, and make inquiry a habit of mind.
Irena Nayfeld specializes in early childhood inquiry and STEM. Visit our Inquiry Workshops page to learn more about how you can bring Irena to your school.

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Always-On Inquiry: Why You Should Be Asking More Questions In Your Classroom

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by Irena Nayfeld, TeachThought PD Inquiry Workshop Facilitator Those of us who spend our days around young children hear it all the time: "What's that?" Children are infinitely curious - they want to understand the world around them, how it all works, where it comes from, and how to interact with it.

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How does a sunset work? We love to look at one, but Jolanda Blackwell wanted her eighth-graders to really think about it, to wonder and question.

So Blackwell, who teaches science at Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior High in Davis, Calif., had her students watch a video of a sunset on YouTube as part of a physics lesson on motion.

"I asked them: 'So what's moving? And why?' " Blackwell says. The students had a lot of ideas. Some thought the sun was moving; others, of course, knew that a sunset is the result of the Earth spinning around on its axis.

Once she got the discussion going, the questions came rapid-fire. "My biggest challenge usually is trying to keep them patient," she says. "They just have so many burning questions."

Students asking questions and then exploring the answers. That's something any good teacher lives for. And at the heart of it all is curiosity.

Blackwell, like many others teachers, understands that when kids are curious, they're much more likely to stay engaged.

But why? What, exactly, is curiosity and how does it work? A study published in the October issue of the journal Neuron suggests that the brain's chemistry changes when we become curious, helping us better learn and retain information.
Our Brains On Curiosity
"In any given day, we encounter a barrage of new information," says Charan Ranganath, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis and one of the researchers behind the study. "But even people with really good memory will remember only a small fraction of what happened two days ago."

Ranganath was curious to know why we retain some information and forget other things.

So he and his colleagues rounded up 19 volunteers and asked them to review more than 100 trivia questions. Questions such as, "What does the term 'dinosaur' actually mean?" and "What Beatles single lasted longest on the charts, at 19 weeks?"

Participants rated each question in terms of how curious they were about the answer.

Next, everyone reviewed the questions - and their answers - while the researchers monitored their brain activity using an MRI machine. When the participants' curiosity was piqued, the parts of their brains that regulate pleasure and reward lit up. Curious minds also showed increased activity in the hippocampus, which is involved in the creation of memories.

"There's this basic circuit in the brain that energizes people to go out and get things that are intrinsically rewarding," Ranganath explains. This circuit lights up when we get money, or candy. It also lights up when we're curious.

When the circuit is activated, our brains release a chemical called dopamine, which gives us a high. "The dopamine also seems to play a role in enhancing the connections between cells that are involved in learning."

Indeed, when the researchers later tested participants on what they learned, those who were more curious were more likely to remember the right answers
Curiosity Helps Us Learn Boring Stuff, Too
There was one more twist in Ranganath's study: Throughout the experiment, the researchers flashed photos of random faces, without giving the participants any explanation as to why.

Those whose curiosity was already piqued were also the best at remembering these faces.

The researchers were surprised to learn that curious brains are better at learning not only about the subject at hand but also other stuff - even incidental, boring information.

"Say you're watching the Breaking Bad finale," Ranganath explains. If you're a huge fan of the show, you're certainly really curious to know what happens to its main character, Walter White.

"You'll undoubtedly remember what happens in the finale," he says, but you might also remember what you ate before watching the episode, and what you did right after.

This is a phenomenon teachers can use to their advantage in the classroom, says Evie Malaia, an assistant professor at the Southwest Center for Mind, Brain and Education at the University of Texas, Arlington.

"Say a kid wants to be an astronaut," she says. "Well, how do you link that goal with learning multiplication tables?" A teacher may choose to ask her class an interesting word problem that involves space exploration, Malaia says.

At the end of the class, students may remember the answer to the word problem, but they'll also remember how they found the answer through multiplication.

"This way kids basically get into the driver's seat," Malaia says. "They feel especially good if they discover something, if they construct knowledge themselves."

Teachers have been using this technique instinctively for years, she adds, and now the science is backing that up. "Curiosity really is one of the very intense and very basic impulses in humans. We should base education on this behavior."
What We Still Don't Know
There's a lot scientists still don't understand about curiosity. "There's only a handful of studies on curiosity," Ranganath says. "It's very hard to study."

Researchers don't know, for example, why exactly we get such a high off learning, through Ranganath says it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. "We might have a basic drive in our brain to fight uncertainty," he says. The more we know about the world, the more likely we are to survive its many perils.

Scientists are also trying to figure out how long the effects of curiosity last - if a kid's curiosity is piqued at the beginning of the school day, will she be good at absorbing knowledge all day long? Or will she lose interest?

What Ranganath wants to know most is why some people seem naturally more curious than others. Lots of factors, including stress, aging and certain drugs can affect dopamine processing in the brain, he says. Genetic factors may also influence how inquisitive we are.

"If we could figure these things out, it would have a huge impact. We could help those who may just seem bored," Ranganath says.

Blackwell, the science teacher in California, says she doesn't have to deal with that problem too often.

She says her students love exploring the mysterious unknowns in science: What happens when a car crashes? Why does one car get more beat up than the other? Why do some people look more like their aunt than their mom? How do rainbows work?

"I tell my kids there's no dumb questions," Blackwell says. "That's science: asking questions and seeking answers."

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New research suggests that curiosity triggers chemical changes in the brain that help us better understand and retain information.

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The Techy Teacher / More Than a Google Search

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The Techy Teacher / More Than a Google Search

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Catlin Tucker

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September 2015 | Volume 73 | Number 1
Questioning for Learning Pages 78-80

Catlin Tucker

Editor's Note: Experts are constantly telling teachers that they need to integrate technology more effectively into instruction. But teachers themselves-drawing on their understanding of their students, their curriculum, and good pedagogy-are the ones who need to make decisions about how to use technology in their own classrooms.

That's why we're delighted to welcome a new columnist, Catlin Tucker, who is both a master teacher and a leader in technology integration. Catlin teaches 9th and 10th grade English language arts at Windsor High School in Sonoma County, California. She is a presenter, professional developer, and the author of numerous books and articles on technology use in education. In this column, Catlin will share practical, replicable strategies she uses in her classroom to harness the power of technology for meaningful learning.

Each year when I take students into the computer lab for the first time, I'm amazed by how little they know about research. They don't know how to articulate a research question. They don't know how to complete a well-executed search. And they don't know how to evaluate the credibility of online resources. This boils down to students with limitless information at their fingertips but no way to sift through or make sense of it all. That's both scary and wasteful.

The language of the Common Core State Standards makes it clear that asking questions to fuel research is crucial to college and career readiness. The word research appears 80 times in the English language arts section of the standards.

In the elementary grades, the teacher typically determines the questions that students will research. As students progress through school, the responsibility of developing research questions shifts from the teacher to the students. By 8th grade, students are expected to "conduct short research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question)."

I'm not surprised that the Common Core standards wait until 8th grade to begin requiring students to articulate their own research questions. Developing a complex question is challenging, so it makes sense that students would need to build up to this higher-level task. Asking good questions is a hard skill to master. But it's absolutely necessary to lifelong learning.

Diving Below the Surface

My 9th grade students and I spend time talking about the difference between on-the-surface questions and below-the-surface questions. I love the way students describe these different types of questions. Students will often explain that on-the-surface questions are "basic," "have one right answer," and "are used when you don't understand something." Under-the-surface questions, in contrast, are "complex," "can be answered in different ways," and "are used to find out how people think or feel about complex topics."

Before we dive into a large-scale research project centered on a complex question of their own design, I get my students accustomed to asking under-the-surface questions by requiring them to write a strong discussion question each night. On a Google Form that I created and embedded in my class website, students fill in their name, class period, e-mail, and one dynamic, complex question that could fuel a discussion or research assignment. They can ask a question about the text we're reading or about an issue related to the text.

The goal is to get students so comfortable asking higher-level questions that they do it almost by reflex. Once they're confident asking under-the-surface questions, we can apply that skill to research.

Developing Search Skills

The beauty of a student-designed research question is that it will lead to a more meaningful research project because students are able to focus on a topic that interests them. Any time teachers give students the autonomy to make choices and steer their own learning, the learning becomes more relevant.

Once students feel confident writing research questions, we dive into what I call Research Reboot. I want to retrain students who have poor research habits so they know how to find information quickly and effectively. We discuss tips and tricks for searching online. Most of my students begin their searches at Google's homepage, but very few know how to narrow their search with a variety of simple strategies. To help them become savvy online researchers who know their way around a search engine, I share tips like these:

Limit searches to a specific domain using "site:" plus domain (for example, site:.edu or site:.org).

Eliminate a word or website from your search using a hyphen directly in front on the word or URL (for example, -en.wikipedia.org).

Find related pages using "related:" plus URL (for example, related:scientificamerican.com).

Students also need to know what questions to ask to evaluate the credibility of an online resource once they find it. At the start of the year, we talk at length about website credibility. I don't want my students to assume that everything they read online is true; I want them to think critically about the information that pops up in a search. However, most of my incoming 9th grade students have no idea what questions to ask to evaluate whether a site is credible.

Three years ago, I designed a "Got Credibility?" Google Form that students must complete for each online resource they want to reference in a research paper, infographic, or project. I want to train their brains to ask the right questions when assessing online sources. The form asks them questions like these:

Is there an author? Does the author have education, experience, or expertise in the field he or she is providing information about?

Is the author or website associated with an institution, organization, or company? Could that association create a bias?

Is the information current? Is that important given the topic?

Does this resource have a "works cited" section or list of references that are credible?

When I first ask students to complete this form, I typically hear a barrage of complaints: "Mrs. Tucker, how am I supposed to know if the author has education, experience, or expertise on this topic?" "Mrs. Tucker, I've never even heard of this company, so how do I know if there is a bias?" "Mrs. Tucker, this takes forever!" I always respond the same way: "Have you asked a classmate for help?" "Have you done a search to find out more about that person or company?" Students begin to realize that I'm not going to give them any answers. Instead, I simply present more questions. They'll remember much more if they've had to struggle a little to find the answers.

Putting Questions to Work

Last year, we embarked on a Challenge-Based Learning Project, a collaborative, hands-on multidisciplinary project that encourages students to research a real-world problem and use the technology at their disposal to design a solution. The teacher presents a theme or big idea, and then students identify the specific challenge they want to tackle.

The overarching theme for our project was sustainability, and students had to articulate a specific driving question that was dynamic enough to fuel ongoing research. Students generated a wide range of questions about issues related to both social and environmental sustainability. I was amazed by the variety of questions. How does water pollution in California affect human and animal health? How does bullying at a young age affect a person mentally and emotionally? How can the United States effectively regulate helium depletion?

As I read through my students' work, I realized they truly had learned how to ask complex questions. These dynamic questions fueled two months of research and collaboration. It was rewarding to see how the work we had put into learning how to articulate a strong question, search online for credible sources, and think critically about that information was now bearing fruit in a student-driven project.

At the end of this project, as students presented their findings and shared their action plans for change, I was amazed to find that I was learning an incredible amount. The flow of teaching and learning had shifted. Students were no longer just consumers of information; they were also generators of information-because they had learned how to ask good questions.

Catlin Tucker is an English language arts teacher at Windsor High School in Sonoma County, California. Her most recent book is Creatively Teach the Common Core Literacy Standards with Technology (Corwin, 2015). She blogs at www.Catlintucker.com. Follow her on Twitter @Catlin_Tucker.

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More Than a Google Search - Educational Leadership

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September 2015 | Volume 73 | Number 1 Questioning for Learning Pages 78-80 Catlin Tucker Editor's Note: Experts are constantly telling teachers that they need to integrate technology more effectively into instruction.

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'A man up a tree hangs from a branch by his mouth; his hands cannot grasp a bough, his feet cannot touch the tree. Another man comes under the tree and asks him the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West. If he does not answer, he does not meet the questioner's need. If he answers he will fall and lose his life. At such a time, how should he answer?' Kyogen's man up a tree
Tonight's 15 Minute Forum was led by Dr Tim Brinded (second year History Teacher) and focussed on the importance of questioning in the classroom. Tim began with the Koan above, which is associated with The Rinzai tradition of Buddhism from the 9th century. Essentially it is a nonsense question which encourages the student to recognise the limitations of logical thought and instead requires them to solve the problem by achieving an inner understanding, leading to transcendence.

The word transcendence is derived from 'trans' (meaning beyond) and 'scandare' (to climb) and links strongly to our role as teachers, to allow our students to reach beyond their current academic level and to achieve the best possible outcomes. This is heavily linked to Dweck's concept of a growth mindset where we, as teachers, attempt to express to our students:

To see their faults and help them to work on them

To challenge them to become a better person

To encourage them to learn new things.

What is the importance of questioning in the classroom?

Paul and Elder (2000) state that 'Thinking is not driven by answers but by questions. Had no questions been asked by those who laid the foundation for a field...the field would never have developed in the first place'. In order to keep a field of thought (or a concept/topic) alive teachers have to constantly ask questions of it, rather than simply allowing that field to close down. Teachers are then able to challenge existing or established answers through questioning to challenge students' thinking.

Research by Smith (1998) states that language-rich classrooms are more conducive environments for learning and thus progress. Objective studies conducted by Smith have shown that young children have a higher IQ at a younger age if their parents regularly spoke to and questioned them, compared to those whose parents did not engage them. In our classrooms, the ability of students to be able to express their views and thoughts is generated through our questioning of them.

As well as these two functions, there are more basic functions of questioning in our classrooms:

To develop interest and motivate students to become actively involved in lessons.

To develop critical thinking skills.

To review learning.

To stimulate students to pursue knowledge on their own and ask their own questions.

Cotton (2001) outlined these functions of questioning and states that 'Instruction which includes posing questions is more effective in producing achievement gains than instruction carried out without questioning students'.

What types of questions can we use?

Essentially there are two categories of questions that we use within our classrooms:

Lower cognitive questions: lower order, convergent or closed questions.

Usually require memory recall of previously learnt information.

There is often only one right or wrong answer such as 'When was the Battle of Edgehill?' The only answer to this is October 1642.

Higher cognitive questions: higher order, divergent or open questions.

These require students to analyse information and apply their knowledge.

An example would be 'what were the consequences of the Battle of Edgehill?' There could be a range of possible answers to this question, but they would all require the students to think and engage with the learning.

However, the research conducted by Cotton (2001) and Hattie (2012) showed that:
'Practice at retrieving new knowledge or skill from memory is a potent tool for learning and durable retention'
20% of classroom questions are higher cognitive questions

20% are procedural questions ('have you got your books with you?)

60% are lower cognitive questions.

Immediately, this suggests that teachers need to increase their use of higher cognitive questions, in order to stretch and challenge their students' thinking. However, it is not to underestimate the value of lower cognitive questions.

Benefits of closed questioning

Brown et al., 2014
'To raise your hand is a critical act that deserves some reflection...In a micro-sense, every time students raise their hands, a milepost passes...To raise your hand is to mark the passage of an event worthy of action...'
Retrieval of knowledge is an important aspect of embedding knowledge and Ebinghaus' 'Forgetting Curve' shows the impact that regular quizzing can have on the retention of knowledge. As a result, lower cognitive questions play an important role in developing and embedding the core knowledge that students need to be able to successfully engage with higher cognitive questions.

Benefits of open questioning

Cotton (2001) states that divergent questioning results in the following, amongst high school students:

On-task behaviour

Speculative thinking on the part of the students

Relevant questions posed by the students.

However, he also states that 'Simply asking higher cognitive questions does not necessarily lead students to produce higher cognitive responses'. This view is supported by Lemov (2015) who states that 'without sufficient factual knowledge this (divergent questioning) will lead to unfounded speculation'. As teachers, it is important that we plan the use of open questions carefully and attempt to foresee the potential pitfalls of our questions.
Wait Time
The importance of teacher reaction to students answers

Lemov's quote is an important one and something which has to be seriously considered by teachers. Lemov is stressing the importance of the student answering the question, not from the actual level of knowledge but from the act itself. This student has shown a considerable level of cognitive effort and has gone through the following processes:
Cold Calling

attending to the question (thinking)

deciphering the meaning of the question (understanding)

creating a covert response (forming the answer in their own mind)

generating an overt response (raising their hand and then speaking their answer).

It is vital that, we as teachers, recognise this but once a student has actively engaged in the learning that we develop that learning further through:

Probing - eliciting further information by asking more questions

Counterfactual answers - asking students for alternative answers or different points of view

Playing devil's advocate - to challenge the students' conviction with their answer

In essence, we are trying to develop greater levels of critical thinking within our students.

How should we ask questions?

It is also important to consider how we ask questions to our students. Studies have shown that on average a student is given 1 second of thinking time before being required to answer a question. By extending the 'wait time' for higher cognitive questions we can:

Increase the number of higher cognitive responses

Increase the length of responses

In crease student achievement

Generate greater participation and increase student-student interactions.

Lemov refers to the 'culture of engaged accountability' where every student knows that it is a possibility that they will have to answer a question. However, in order to achieve this a 'safe' classroom environment needs to be created. The advantages of selecting students to answer (rather than hands-up) are:

It sets clear expectations in your classroom - everyone participates.

It removes the chance of relying too heavily on one or two confident students

As with all teaching strategies, a mixed approach is beneficial. Calling a students' name first can be beneficial; as it focuses them on the question. In addition, posing a demanding question at the beginning of the lesson and stating that you will select students to answer it in 10 minutes or at the end of the lesson, provides the opportunity for all of the students to think about the question.

In summary questioning in lessons is an important aspect of teaching because it:

drives learning

creates a language rich environment

reviews learning

encourages engagement and motivation

develops critical thinking

However, the type of and way in which we use questions needs to be carefully considered if we are to maximise the potential of our students.

Posted by Martyn Simmonds

Tim Brinded 15 min forum from Jason Ramasami on Vimeo.

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Kyogen's man up a tree 'A man up a tree hangs from a branch by his mouth; his hands cannot grasp a bough, his feet cannot touch the tree. Another man comes under the tree and asks him the meaning o...

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An Updated Guide to Questioning in the Classroom

by Terry Heick

Something we've become known for is our focus on thought, inquiry, and understanding, and questions are a big part of that. We've done questions that students should ask, parents should ask, students should and shouldn't answer, questions that promote and stifle inquiry, questions that reveal self-knowledge and wisdom, and more.

If the ultimate goal of education is for students to be able to effectively answer questions, then focusing on content and response strategies makes sense. If the ultimate goal of education is to teach students to think, then focusing on how we can help students ask better questions themselves might make sense, no?

Why Questions Are More Important Than Answers

The ability to ask the right question at the right time is a powerful indicator of authentic understanding. Asking a question that pierces the veil in any given situation is itself an artifact of the critical thinking teachers so desperately seek in students, if for no other reason than it shows what the student knows, and then implies the desire to know more.

Asking a question (using strategies to help students ask better questions, for example) is a sign of understanding, not ignorance; it requires both knowledge and then-critically-the ability to see what else you're missing.

Questions are more important than answers because they reflect both understanding and curiosity in equal portions. To ask a question is to see both backward and forward-to make sense of a thing and what you know about it, and then extend outward in space and time to imagine what else can be known, or what others might know. To ask a great question is to see the conceptual ecology of the thing.

In a classroom, a student can see a drop of water, a literary device, a historical figure, or a math theorem, but these are just fragments that are worthless in and of themselves. A student in biology studying a drop of water must see the water as infinitely plural-as something that holds life and something that gives life.

As a marker of life, and an icon of health.

It is a tool, a miracle, a symbol, and a matter of science.

They must know what's potentially inside of a drop of water, and then how to find out what's actually inside that drop of water.

They must know what others have found studying water, as well as what that drop of water means within the field of science, and beyond it.

They must know that water is never really just water.

Teacher Questions vs Student Questions

When teachers try to untangle this cognitive mess, they sacrifice personalization for efficiency. There are simply too many students, and too much content to cover, so they cut to the chase.

Which means then tend towards the universal over the individual-broad, sweeping questions intermingling with sharper, more concise questions that hopefully shed some light and cause some curiosity. In a class of 30 with an aggressively-paced curriculum map and the expectation that every student master the content regardless of background knowledge, literacy level, or interest in the material, this is the best most teachers can do.

This only a bottleneck, though, when the teacher asks the questions. When the student asks the question, the pattern is reversed. The individual student has little regard for the welfare of the class, especially when they're forming questions. They're on the clock to say something, anything. Which is great, because questions-when they're authentic-are automatically personal because they came up with them. They're not tricks or guess-what-the-teacher's-thinking.

A student couldn't possibly capture the scale of confusion or curiosity of 30 other people; instead, they survey their own thinking, spot both gaps and fascinations, and form a question. This is the spring-loading of a Venus flytrap. The topic crawls around in the mind of the student innocently enough, and when the time is right-and the student is confident-the flower snaps shut. Once a student starts asking questions, that magic of learning can begin.

And the best part for a teacher? Questions reveal far more than answers ever might.

The Purpose of Questions

Thought of roughly as a kind of spectrum, four purposes of questions might stand out, from more "traditional" to more "progressive."

In What Is The Purpose Of A Question? Terry Heick said:

"To be a little more abstract, a good question causes thinking-more questions. Better questions. It clarifies and reveals. It causes hope.

A bad question stops thinking. It confuses and obscures. It causes doubt."

(More Traditional) Academic View

In a traditional academic setting, the purpose of a question is to elicit a response that can be assessed (i.e., answer this question so I can see what you know).

(Less Traditional) Curriculum-Centered View

Here, a 'good question' matters more than a good answer, as it demonstrates the complexity of student understanding of a given curriculum.

(More Progressive) Inquiry View

As confusion or curiosity markers that suggest a path forward for inquiry, and then are iterated and improved based on learning. (Also known as question-based learning.)

(More Progressive Still) Self-Directed View

In a student-centered circumstance, a question illuminates possible learning pathways forward irrespective of curriculum demands. The student's own knowledge demands-and their uncovering-center and catalyze the learning experience.

To be a little more abstract, a good question causes thinking-more questions. Better questions. It clarifies and reveals. It causes hope. A bad question stops thinking. It confuses and obscures. It causes doubt.

The Relative Strengths of Questions

Good questions can reveal subtle shades of understanding-what this student knows about this topic in this context

Questions promote inquiry and learning how to learn over proving what you know

Questions fit in well with the modern "Google" mindset

Used well, questions can promote personalized learning as teachers can change questions on the fly to meet student needs

The Relative Weaknesses of Questions

Questions depend on language, which means literacy, jargon, confusing syntax, academic diction, and more can all obscure the learning process

Questions can imply answers, which imply stopping points and 'finishing' over inquiry and wisdom (See questions that promote inquiry-based learning.)

Accuracy of answers can be overvalued, which makes the confidence of the answerer impact the quality of the response significantly

"Bad questions" are easy to write and deeply confusing, which can accumulate to harm a student's sense of self-efficacy, as well as their own tendency to ask them on their own

7 Common Written Assessment Question Forms

Questions as written assessment (as opposed to questions as inquiry, questions to guide self-directed learning, or questions to demonstrate understanding) most commonly take the following forms in writing:

Matching

True/False

Multiple Choice

Short Answer

Diagramming

Essay

Open-Ended

Questioning In The Classroom & Self-Directed Learning

For years in classrooms, questions have guided teachers in the design of units and lessons, often through the development of essential questions that all students should be able to reasonably respond to, and that can guide their learning of existing and pre-mapped content.

In the TeachThought Self-Directed Learning Model, learners are required to create their own curriculum through a series of questions that emphasize self-knowledge, citizenship, and communal and human interdependence. In this model, existing questions act as a template to uncover potential learning pathways.

Also, the Question Formation Technique is a powerful strategy for asking questions in the classroom, which you can read about here along with other strategies for helping students ask great questions in the classroom.

What Is Cognitive Dissonance?

Cognitive Dissonance is the cognitively-uncomfortable act of holding two seemingly competing beliefs at the same time. If you believe that Freedom of Speech is the foundation of democracy, but then are presented with a perspective (through Socratic-style questioning in the classroom from the teacher, for example), you arrive (or the student does) at a crossroads where they have to adjust something-either their belief or their judgment about the validity of the question itself.

In this way, questions can promote Cognitive Dissonance-which means a good question can change a student's mind, beliefs, or tendency to examine their own beliefs. Questions, cognitive, and self-reflection go hand-in-hand.

The Role of 'Lower-Level' Questions

Lower-level questions are questions that inquire at 'lower levels' of various learning taxonomies.

These are often 'recall' questions that are based in fact-definitions, dates, names, biographical details, etc. Education is thought to have focused (without having been there, who knows for sure?) on these lower levels, and 'low' is bad in academics, right? 'Lower-level' thinking implies a lack of 'higher-level' thinking, so instead of analyzing, interpreting, evaluating, and creating, students are defining, recalling, and memorizing, the former of which make for artists and designers and innovators, and the latter of which make for factory workers.

And that part, at least, is (mostly) true. Recall and memorization aren't the stuff of understanding, much less creativity and wisdom, except that they are. Bloom's Taxonomy was not created to segregate 'good thinking' from 'bad thinking.' In their words, "Our attempt to arrange educational behaviors from simple to complex was based on the idea that a particular simple behavior may become integrated with other equally simple behaviors to form a more complex behavior." In this way, the taxonomy is simply one way of separating the strands of thinking like different colored yarn-a kind of visual scheme to see the pattern, contrasts, and even sequence of cognitive actions.

Nowhere does it say that definitions and names and labels and categories are bad-and if it did, we'd have to wonder about the taxonomy rather than assuming that they were. It doesn't take much imagination to see that if a student doesn't know there was a war, and that it was fought in the United States in the 1800s, and that it was purportedly over states' rights, and that both culture, industry, and agriculture all impacted the hows, whens, and whys of the war, that 'higher-level thinking strategies' aren't going to be very useful.

In short, lower-level questions can both illuminate and establish foundational knowledge on which to build a more complex and nuanced understanding of content. They provide a foothold for thinking. To further the point, in 5 Common Misconceptions About Bloom's Taxonomy, Grant Wiggins explains that the phrases 'higher-order' and 'lower-order' don't appear anywhere in the taxonomy.

Essential Questions

Grant Wiggins defined an essential question as those that are "broad in scope and timeless by nature. They are perpetually arguable."

Examples of Essential Questions

What is justice?

Is art a matter of taste or principles?

How far should we tamper with our own biology and chemistry?

Is science compatible with religion?

Is an author's view privileged in determining the meaning of a text?

A question is essential when it:

causes genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content;

provokes deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as well as more questions;

requires students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers;

stimulates vital, ongoing rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons;

sparks meaningful connections with prior learning and personal experiences;

naturally recurs, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations and subjects.

You can see more examples of essential questions here.

On Tuesday, we'll help you take this background information and channel into specific question strategies that you can use to help students learn to create their own questions.
A Guide To Questioning In The Classroom; image attribution flickr user flickeringbrad

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An Updated Guide To Questioning In The Classroom

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by Terry Heick Something we've become known for is our focus on thought, inquiry, and understanding, and questions are a big part of that. We've done questions that students should ask, parents should ask, students should and shouldn't answer, questions that promote and stifle inquiry, questions that reveal self-knowledge and wisdom, and more.

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Cris Tovani

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September 2015 | Volume 73 | Number 1
Questioning for Learning Pages 30-35

Cris Tovani

With eyes down at his desk he says, "OK."

"So what have you figured out?"

Abruptly, Tomás raises his head and says, "Miss, I'm not so good at answering questions. I don't know a lot."

"What do you mean you don't know a lot?" I ask.

Quietly, he replies, "Whenever teachers ask me questions, I can't answer them."

"Well," I said, "let's switch things around. Why don't you ask the questions?"

"Me," he says incredulously. "What do you mean?"

"Yes, you," I say. "What questions do you have about your reading?"

Almost immediately, Tomás starts firing off things he's wondering about. "I'm confused," he says. "Sometimes the book is about the narrator being at war, and then it switches to when he is old. It's like a flashback. Are all these chapters connected, or are they like short stories?"

I smile at Tomás and say, "I think you know a lot. Maybe you've been so busy answering other people's questions that you haven't had time to work on your own." Tomás smiles and together we start to figure out how O'Brien uses time to structure The Things They Carried.

Thinking about my conference with Tomás, I have to wonder how his belief that he doesn't know very much affects him as a reader. Does it prevent him from asking his own questions? Does it make him more passive and encourage him to wait for the teacher to tell him what the book is about? Does it discourage him from thinking critically?

Why Do Students' Questions Matter Most?

We have trained students so well to be question answerers that by the time they reach middle school some think their job is to be mind readers. Kenneth Vogler (2008) estimates that "teachers ask about 300-400 questions per day and as many as 120 questions per hour." Researcher Susan Black (2001) reports that teachers' verbal questioning of their students is second only to teacher lecturing. Yet when students stop asking questions, they begin to abdicate responsibility for their learning. Instead, they sit back and let someone else do the thinking for them.

Don't get me wrong. There is definitely a place for teacher questioning. But most of the time, teachers ask questions they already know the answers to, leaving little space for original thought. Often, a student can get the answer by putting it into Google or SparkNotes. Asking even high-level questions doesn't necessarily mean getting high-level answers that students came up with on their own.

We are kidding ourselves if we think our questions alone turn students into critical thinkers. But if we ask students to ask questions that they care about, we get a truer sense of their understanding. It's a lot harder to fake an authentic question than it is to copy an answer from some Internet site.

Barbara Bess, whom I taught with years ago, has a motto: "The brilliance is in the question" (Tovani, 2011). One day when I was observing, I heard her say, "No one is going to cure cancer by repeating some fact that the experts already know. It will be a researcher's question that leads to a new discovery. As literature researchers, what is your question?"

Instead of spending time honing our questioning skills, it's time we help students hone theirs. Giving students opportunities to practice questioning will help them way beyond the classroom. People who wonder set a purpose for themselves. They know asking questions will propel them to continue reading and learning. Questions give learners a tool for picking out information that may be useful.

In addition, learners who ask questions are able to isolate their confusion. Questions force them to articulate what their confusion is instead of merely saying, "What? I don't get this!" Learners can then work to repair their confusion by seeking more information. Asking questions gives learners control.

When I think about the students I am preparing to run the world, I want them to seek information and articulate their confusion. I want them to be propelled to study more and to have strategies that help them stay with challenging material. What I don't want is for them to repeat information that everyone already knows-what a waste of time. I much prefer that my students tell me what they wonder so I can guide their learning.

It gets boring asking the same old questions over and over again. If I'm bored with my instruction, most likely students are bored, too. Recently, after observing one of my classes, a colleague said, "It must be nice to not have any discipline problems so you can teach." Although students occasionally act out in my room, I rarely have long-term discipline issues. It's not because I have a no-fail classroom management plan. My secret, I think, is focusing on my students' questions.

How Can I Get Students to Ask Questions?

I taught elementary school for years before becoming a high school teacher. The younger the grade, the more questions I got. Little ones are naturally curious. By the time kids reach adolescence, the love of questioning is sometimes gone. But I know that curiosity still exists inside my high school students. I just have to reawaken it.

I think the main reason older students don't ask question is fear that they may look wrong or dumb or too excited about school. Years ago, I attended a summer workshop in Denver at which Ralph Fletcher delivered a keynote about honoring the risks our students take. He said, "If the first troops that hit the beach get mowed down, no one will follow. Be careful how you respond to the first troops."

For teenagers, school can be scary and asking questions is risky, especially if you're working really hard to be cool. To avoid "mowing down" the first question askers in my room, I must respond to questions in a way that honors their risk. I have to work hard to make it safe for all questions and all questioners. Here are a few of my strategies:

I use students' questions to drive the next day's reading. These questions often energize others to read and provide great discussion material for small-group conversations. I throw in a few of my questions, too, but I avoid asking ones that only have one right answer.

I'm selective about the questions I answer. When students ask a clarifying question-one that starts with a who, what, when, or where-I try to answer it. I would find it difficult to ask a how or why question if I were still wondering about who, what, when, or where. When a student asks a how or why question, I try to respond with another question, such as "Why do you think that's happening?" Answering with a quick response tells the learner that the thinking is done.

Sometimes I share my annotated text, pointing out my questions. I show students that I care about some questions more than others and remind them that some questions deserve more effort in answering than others.

What Do Student Questions Tell Me?

Students' questions provide a great deal of invaluable formative assessment data that helps me adjust instruction. For example, students' questions about a recent reading assignment shows me what students understood and gives me ideas for helping them.

The students are considering the age-old question of nature versus nurture-how does each affect a person's future? One group is reading The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, a story of two men named Wes Moore who each face adverse conditions growing up. The Wes who authored the book is a successful civic leader, but the other Wes Moore is in prison for life. Readers get to contemplate the role of nature and nurture in the two men's lives.

Before I release students to read, I model how I read with the eye of a sociologist. I share a couple of events from the book and analyze whether the outcome of the event is an effect of the character's DNA or of his environment. As students read, I encourage them to jot down both their questions and their analysis regarding nature and nurture on their "think sheets," handouts I've provided for students to record their thinking as they read. I can use these sheets to give them feedback.

As students read, I circulate the room, discussing the students' questions with them individually. I don't get around to everyone during class, so I grab the think sheets from the students I didn't talk with. I start with Shayanne's. She writes, "Author Wes tells Sergeant Austin, 'I'm from the Bronx' and he says it with a lot of pride. I wonder if living in the Bronx gave him confidence to not be scared of anyone or anything. I think this has to do with nurturing." Shayanne is really thinking about this nature versus nurture concept. She asks a question but then goes on to answer it with a logical inference.

Jenny, who is failing and missing a lot of class, writes, "Why did Sergeant Austin trick author Wes into thinking he had a chance of leaving the military academy?" Her question surprises me because it shows that she is farther along in the book than the rest of her group. Maybe she is a better student than I thought. I wonder why she is reading but not doing her written work. I need to find out what she needs to get back on track.

Juan asks about something that happened 15 pages earlier, which lets me know he is behind. It's OK, though, because his question about how the two mothers' style of punishment affects each boy shows he is really reading and thinking about nature versus nurture as it relates to where he is in the book.

Adriana writes, "What if jailbird Wes had gone to a military school? Would he have turned out better?" I write back to her, "I'm not sure. I think it affected him, but we'll need to keep reading to see." Now she can think about this question as she continues reading.

Angelica, a firm believer that nature can't be changed, loves this topic and the book. She wonders where author Wes's mom got the money to pay for military school. This question propels her to keep reading. Angelica then asks, "Does the mom really believe Wes can change? Was his mom a bad kid that went to this school? Does this school eventually help him?" Angelica's questions tell me that she doesn't have a lot of knowledge about military schools. I can quickly let her know the next day that there were typically no girls at these schools when Wes's mom was young. I could also tell her what Wes's mom was like, but I won't. Instead, I will redirect her to the sections at the beginning of the book that describe author Wes's mom.

I'm humbled by my students' questions. Often, they are better than mine. I'm also thankful for their questions because they give me insight on how to differentiate instruction. If students were all answering the same teacher-generated question, I wouldn't be able to tell who got it and who copied.

What Questions Should Teachers Ask?

My students' questions matter most because they give me insight into what the students know and need. However, that doesn't mean I never get to ask any questions. With the help of my instructional coach, Samantha Bennett, I've discovered a pattern in the questions I tend to ask. Usually, my questions fall under one of two categories: questions that create awareness and questions that inform my instruction.

Questions That Create Awareness

When my friend Marci says, "Did you notice how many biblical references there are in Toni Morrison's Beloved? What do you think that's all about?" I don't have a quick answer. But that evening when I'm reading the novel, I pay attention. And in the next book I pick up, I look for allusions and ask myself about those as well.

When I ask students these kinds of questions, I don't expect one right answer. My goal is to spark a conversation that will expand the way students examine text. Here are a few of my favorites:

What are you noticing about how the author is using time? Is he jumping forward, flashing back, or moving through events chronologically? What purpose do you think it serves?

What background knowledge do you have about the book, topic, author, or characters?

What are you wondering about the book, topic, author, or characters?

Did you notice the title? Any ideas how it connects to the piece?

What weird or unusual text structures are you noticing? Why do think the author structured the chapter that way?

What predictions are you making?

What questions do you have? Which ones do you care most about?

Which character's perspective are you connecting to most?

Are there any objects or colors that keep popping up?

How could you look at this information differently?

Sometimes when I ask students questions like these, they don't have a lot to say because they need time to read with the question in mind. So I may ask them which question intrigues them most and what they want to look for as they read. This gives students ownership. It's important that I write down what intrigues them so I can touch base with them the next day by simply asking, "Hey, Tomás, what did you figure out about O'Brien's use of time?"

Questions That Inform Instruction

When I want to find out what students know and need, I have to ask questions that give them multiple ways to respond. Their responses are entry points into their thinking and understanding. Questions like these work well:

What do you need?

Is this boring or are you stuck? What makes this boring? What do think is causing you to be stuck? What have you done before to get unstuck that might help you?

Have you tried what we talked about in the minilesson?

What's preventing you from working? What causes you to stop?

Why do you think that?

What might you try tomorrow?

What do you know now that you didn't know before?

What's going on in your head as your read? What is your inner voice saying?

In the End, What Does Matter Most?

In A More Beautiful Question, author Warren Berger (2014) invites us all-teachers, students, business leaders, innovators, and parents-to ignite learning by asking more beautiful questions. He writes, "In searching for common denominators among [the world's] brilliant change-makers, one thing I kept finding was that many of them were exceptionally good at asking questions" (p. 1).

So I challenge you to allow students to ask questions more often. If you must be the question asker, I challenge you to pose this single, simple, beautiful question to your students-no matter the content, no matter the learning goal-"What are you wondering?"

References

Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question. New York: Bloomsbury.

Black, S. (2001). Ask me a question: How teachers use inquiry in the classroom. American School Board Journal, 188(5), 43-45.

Tovani, C. (2011). So what do they really know? Assessment that informs teaching and learning. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Vogler, K. (2008). Asking good questions. Educational Leadership, 65(9).

Cris Tovani teaches English at Adams City High School in Commerce City, Colorado. She is the author of So What Do They Really Know? Assessment That Informs Teaching and Learning (Stenhouse, 2011).

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September 2015 | Volume 73 | Number 1 Questioning for Learning Pages 30-35 Cris Tovani With eyes down at his desk he says, "OK." "So what have you figured out?" Abruptly, Tomás raises his head and says, "Miss, I'm not so good at answering questions. I don't know a lot."

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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.

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Grant Wiggins and Denise Wilbur

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September 2015 | Volume 73 | Number 1
Questioning for Learning Pages 10-15

Grant Wiggins and Denise Wilbur

They stimulate ongoing thinking and inquiry.

They're arguable, with multiple plausible answers.

They raise further questions.

They spark discussion and debate.

They demand evidence and reasoning because varying answers exist.

They point to big ideas and pressing issues.

They fruitfully recur throughout the unit or year.

The answers proposed are tentative and may change in light of new experiences and deepening understanding (McTighe & Wiggins, 2013).

Here are some examples of good essential questions: To what extent does where you live influence how you live? What should we make of outliers-error, anomaly, or insight? What should our diet and wellness plans be in a world of constantly changing advice from experts?

Seven Ways to Hone Your Questions

Alas, such questions rarely emerge in the first draft. Here are some common first-draft questions: How do good readers use strategies to understand text? What's the value of chemistry? What were the three major causes of World War I? Why do earthquakes happen?

These questions fail to meet the suggested criteria. They're all convergent, low-level questions designed to support content acquisition. They either point toward the one official "right" answer, or they elicit mere lists and thus no further inquiry.

If first drafts of essential questions are likely to be too fact-focused, how can we ensure that subsequent drafts better meet the criteria? Here are some editing tips, which, in the spirit of the topic, we've framed as questions.

1. How well does the draft question meet the criteria?

Writers of essential questions need to develop the discipline of pausing to deliberately self-assess their question against specific criteria. Look at the first nonexample: How do good readers use strategies to understand text? The question is leading; it merely aims to remind students of the answer. It asks for recall, not inquiry.

A better question might be, Which strategy should I use when I don't understand what I'm reading? By putting the question this way, the student must think about all possible moves and determine which to use in each "stuck" situation. The research on effective instruction in comprehension strategies shows that asking students to generalize their answers helps them become self-regulated learners because generalizations facilitate transfer (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Brown & Palincsar, 1984; Wiggins, 2015).

Tip: Create a simple checklist to use for either self- or peer-assessment of draft questions. The checklist should include the criteria listed above. You can also use the seven questions in this article to self-assess your draft. Finally, get in the habit of running draft ideas by others. Sometimes by just saying the draft question aloud, you'll realize how to edit it.

2. If the question is too convergent, how can I phrase it to invite inquiry and argument? If the question is factual, what question on the same topic is worth arguing about?

Arguments involve unsettled issues of understanding or application-not settled knowledge and skill. We typically find debates not in the content itself but in discussions of its value, importance, or applicability. For example, there's no argument about how to kick a soccer ball with the instep, but there are endless debates over when to shoot, pass, or dribble.

Here's a draft question in English language arts: What is proper punctuation, and why is it important? There's little argument about the first half of the question, and the second half seems likely to limit, rather than expand, inquiry. Referring to the soccer example-and to debates on when to execute certain actions in the game-we can revise the punctuation question to read, When is proper punctuation mandatory, and when is it optional? We can easily prompt debate by looking at poems and social media messages that are not "properly" punctuated and at unfortunate punctuation errors in more formal writing to deepen the inquiry and lead to important general understandings.

Some easy editing moves can open things up. Rephrase a draft question using sentence stems like, To what extent ... ?, In what contexts ... ?, How important was ... ?, and so on. By doing so, you can turn a humdrum question-such as, Why is World War I important?-into something vastly improved: How important was World War I in shaping the modern world?

Tip: When planning your questions, make a T-chart in which you list both the important factual questions and the essential questions of the unit to avoid conflating the two or landing on factual questions out of habit. To move from inarguable to arguable aspects of the topic, try framing key learning and assessment tasks using the suggested stems. Here are a few more: What's the value of ... ? When should we ... , and when shouldn't we ... ? What's the optimal strategy? Or try the provocation we use in Understanding by Design: If the facts are answers, what were the questions?

3. Is the question merely engaging? Or will pursuing it lead to the topic's big ideas?

To engage students, some teachers frame an essential question that goes off on a tangent. But a good question has to be more than just intriguing. The best essential questions are, literally, of the essence: They take you to the core issues and insights of a topic.

Our longtime favorite engaging, but tangential, question is, Crustaceans: What's up with them? It's certainly open ended, and it could go in a million directions. But it's unlikely to uncover rigorous, in-depth learning in biology. On the other hand, What good is a bug? more easily leads to deep inquiries into ecology, agriculture, health, and so on.

In math, here's a common first-draft question: Where do we find examples of ____ in the real world? This question means well, but it leads to the world of things, not to the world of ideas; it will yield only a list of factual answers. There's no inquiry into mathematics.

A teacher we worked with wanted to ask, Where in the world do we find examples of similar triangles? After listening to the above argument, he quickly came up with this edited version: How much and in what ways would we most miss similar figures if they didn't exist? Not only is this a more intriguing and arguable question, but it also goes deep into math, opening up an exploration of other geometries besides the familiar Euclidean one.

Tip: Start by making a concept web for the topics of the unit. Identify the hard-to-understand but vital connections of ideas. Make sure your question points to the ideas identified, suggests interesting inquiries, and helps uncover the powerful ideas. Ask yourself, What does this idea help us make sense of? How does it help us connect the dots of our learning?

4. Is the question general enough to use across other units? Or is it bound too narrowly to just this topic or text?

We want a question that rewards us for revisiting it. Here's a draft question, based on a reading of one of the stories in Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad series: How do Frog and Toad act like friends? By revising the question to this- Who is a true friend?-we can connect to varied texts and to personal experience. In addition to making us question the question-What do we mean by true friend?-this revised query recurs over and over throughout our lives, in history and psychology as well as in literature. The genius of Lobel is that Frog and Toad sometimes don't act like friends, which deepens the inquiry.

Here's another example showing the virtue of a more general focus. The question, Why did we fight in Vietnam, and was it worth it? sets a more helpful agenda for a history course when we revise it to read, Why have we gone to war? When was it wise, and when was it foolish?

Tip: Avoid mentioning or edit out the specific topic in the question. Don't mention specific books, events, or facts. Instead, pose the question more generally about concepts such as friendship, war, ecosystems, and so on. We call such questions overarching (McTighe & Wiggins, 2013; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, 2013).

5. Does the question get at what's odd, counterintuitive, or easily misunderstood? Or is it a predictable question with mundane and relatively superficial answers?

Here are some common first-draft questions: What's the difference between fiction and nonfiction? What's a theory in science? What is history? What can numbers help us do? These questions don't lead us very far. They call attention to key ideas, but they don't promote in-depth inquiry. And frankly, they're a bit dull and "teacherly."

By contrast, successful questions do just the opposite: They highlight apparent paradoxes or counterintuitive investigations. Here are those "teacherly" questions revised: When is fiction revealing, and when is it a lie? If we can't see something (gravity, human evolution, dinosaurs, and so on), how do we know it is or was there? If history is the story told by the winners, what stories aren't we hearing? What can't the language of numbers communicate?

Misconceptions are a rich resource for such questions. For example, a common misconception in physics is the assumption that a ball thrown in the air has two forces acting on it once it leaves the hand: the force from the hand pushing it up and the force of gravity pulling it down. Actually, there's only one force acting on the ball: the force of gravity. So, a devilishly simple essential question would be, Why does the ball move that way? Not only will you generate interesting and diverse theories, but you'll uncover misunderstandings.

Tip: Familiarize yourself with the most counterintuitive and commonly misunderstood aspects of the subjects you teach, and build your questions around them. There are countless websites on common student misconceptions for all academic subjects. Simply search for "student misconceptions in ____" in your web browser.

6. Am I trying too hard to craft the perfect question?

We often see question writers trying hard to create the one ideal question on the first try. Everything we know about the writing and design processes reminds us that this is an unsuccessful approach. We want numerous and diverse ideas at first, jotted down quickly, from which a good one will emerge.

The problem is compounded when writers spend too much time wordsmithing the question instead of trying to generate the best intellectual direction. Don't try to write and edit simultaneously. Draft a bunch of questions first, then edit. The more versions you draft, the easier the editing will be.

Tip: Use brainstorming rules: Don't judge (or self-judge), and jot down lots of ideas in a brief span of time. Also, draft webs of related questions. For example, when it comes to a piece of writing, you might ask, What am I trying to say? To whom am I trying to say it? What do I want readers to leave with or be ready to do after reading this? Maybe you'll use all the questions, and maybe you won't. But creating such webs usually points to a deeper and more powerful direction for inquiry.

7. Am I looking for questions in all the wrong places?

By committing to essential questions as a framing approach, you're planning for inquiry and argument as a priority outcome. Essential questions aren't a teaching move. Rather, they're a design move intended to make it more likely that the work and talk get beyond low-level coverage. So looking only at the content you wish students to acquire is not the optimal way to come up with good questions.

To aim for understanding is to aim for three kinds of learning: acquisition, meaning making, and transfer. Given the content, then, what theories should learners build and test? What problems and texts will prompt them to do so? What attempts at application will raise all the right arguments and require further generalizations?

For example, in a unit on mean, median, and mode, just learning to manipulate those three concepts won't develop understanding. The interesting and arguable aspects of those concepts lie in how to best use them-and avoid misusing them!-in making sense of real data. So this draft question heads in the wrong direction: When do we use mean, median, and mode? Rather, focus on the significance and applicability of the ideas: What's the fairest way to calculate grades? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each measure of tendency? When are measures of central tendency most abused, and how can we defend against such abuses?

Tip: Build into your lessons meaning-making and application challenges-for example, a Socratic seminar, formal debate, or problem-based learning project. By committing to using at least one such interactive approach, you'll more likely come up with an arguable and intriguing question for framing the unit.

The Bottom Line

The fact is, you need to develop the habit of always critiquing the essential questions you draft. High-level inquiries and questioning yield some of the greatest gains possible on conventional tests of achievement, as well as better student engagement.

Getting the questions right takes discipline, skill, and artfulness. But it's well worth the effort to ensure that students tackle inquiries that are important, intriguing, and revealing.

References

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (Expanded ed.). Washington DC: National Academies Press.

Brown, A. S., & Palincsar, A. L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2), 117-175.

McTighe, J., & Wiggins, G. (2013). Essential questions: Opening doors to student understanding. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Wiggins, G. (2015, April 20). On transfer as the goal of literacy [blog post]. Retrieved from Granted, and ... at https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/on-transfer-as-the-goal-in-literacy-7th-in-a-series

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (expanded 2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2011). The understanding by design guide to creating high-quality units. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Grant Wiggins, an influential educator, author, and friend to ASCD, died suddenly before this article went into production. Among his many contributions to education was the Understanding by Design (UbD) curriculum model, cocreated with Jay McTighe. Wiggins authored numerous Educational Leadership articles and ASCD books. He was president of Authentic Education, a New Jersey-based education training and consulting firm.

Particularly pertinent to this EL theme, Wiggins coined the term essential questions as it has come to be understood in education. He will be missed by friends throughout the education community.

Denise Wilbur, coauthor of this article, was Grant's wife and is the vice president of Authentic Education.

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September 2015 | Volume 73 | Number 1 Questioning for Learning Pages 10-15 Grant Wiggins and Denise Wilbur They stimulate ongoing thinking and inquiry. They're arguable, with multiple plausible answers. They raise further questions. They spark discussion and debate. They demand evidence and reasoning because varying answers exist.

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Marge Scherer

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September 2015 | Volume 73 | Number 1
Questioning for Learning Pages 7-7

Marge Scherer

In his book The Upright Thinkers (Pantheon, 2015), physicist Leonard Mlodinow recounts a conversation he had with his father, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Reflecting on his time in prison, his father recalled an incident when a fellow emaciated inmate, a learned mathematician, showed him a math puzzle. Intrigued, his father, who had only a 7th grade education himself, tried to solve the puzzle, but could not. When he asked for the explanation, the mathematician offered a deal-the solution for a crust of bread. "My father's need to know was so powerful, he parted with his bread in exchange for the answer," the author writes (p. 3).

Mloldinow's book explores our pursuit of questions from the ancient times of food gatherers and toolmakers up through our own times shaped by digital communication and quantum science. "We are the species whose trademark is to think and question," he writes. "Only we, due to the power of our minds, have met all survival challenges (thus far)" (p. 11). Humans, he notes, have another amazing propensity: to teach one another. Unlike other animals-from lizards to chimps, dolphins to elephants-humans learn through sharing ideas and looking for answers together. We are the species that asks.

This issue is all about questioning for learning-how to ask questions of students, how to encourage students to ask their own questions, and how to ask better questions and find better answers. Among topics explored in this issue are why children, who start questioning almost as soon as they learn to talk, ask far fewer questions when they get to school.

Paul Harris describes the findings of research analyses of extensive transcripts of children's natural speech. Some of the studies show the amazing number of questions that children typically ask at home (an average of 25 questions per hour). And interestingly, the more satisfactory answers the children receive, the more questions they pose. At school, however, as another study finds, teachers ask 30 times as many questions as their students do. Harris concludes that if teachers become more aware of questioning patterns in their classrooms, they would be able to create conditions that encouraged more student questions.

Authors in this issue also discuss how feasible it is to encourage questioning in the age of standards and pacing guides, as well as how often adults should answer questions as opposed to guiding students to find the answers on their own. Alfie Kohn believes that students' questions should be the primary driver of their learning and that teachers should model and encourage a skeptical disposition. Others from Susan Brookhart to Dylan Wiliam to Cris Tovani point out how teachers can use a blend of teacher and student questions to understand how students think as well as to help them think more clearly.

No doubt questioning for learning is a subject that gets to the very heart of schooling, as the late great thinker Grant Wiggins wrote long ago in Educational Leadership. In " The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything of Importance" (November 1989), he grappled with the dilemma of either loading students with "essential content" and risking their being overwhelmed or uninterested, or aiming at a more modest target and leaving out far too much. His essential insight was to organize the curriculum around essential questions in such a way as to represent "the (incomplete and always provocative) answers." That way, "students would leave school with the passion to question, without the fear of looking foolish, and with the knowledge to learn where and how the facts can be found."

Shortly before his untimely death, Grant and his cowriter and wife Denise Wilbur followed up on the exploration of essential questions, suggesting seven ways to question your questions. These include identifying the hard-to-understand but vital connections of ideas; posing a question more generally about concepts such as friendship, war, ecosystems, and so on; and familiarizing yourself with the most commonly misunderstood aspects of the subjects you teach and building your questions around them.

Getting the questions right takes discipline, skill, and artfulness, they write. But it's well worth the effort to ensure that students tackle important, intriguing, and revealing questions-the kind that will help humankind survive and thrive.

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Educational Leadership:Questioning for Learning:The Species That Asks

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September 2015 | Volume 73 | Number 1 Questioning for Learning Pages 7-7 Marge Scherer In his book The Upright Thinkers (Pantheon, 2015), physicist Leonard Mlodinow recounts a conversation he had with his father, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

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Questioning Techniques: Research-Based Strategies for Teachers 

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Questioning Techniques: Research-Based Strategies for Teachers 

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Questioning techniques are a heavily used, and thus widely researched, teaching strategy. Research indicates that asking questions is second only to lecturing. Teachers typically spend anywhere from 35 to 50 percent of their instructional time asking questions. But are these questions effective in raising student achievement? How can teachers ask better questions of their students? How can current educational research inform practice?

WHY ASK QUESTIONS?

Teachers ask questions for a variety of purposes, including:

To actively involve students in the lesson

To increase motivation or interest

To evaluate students' preparation

To check on completion of work

To develop critical thinking skills

To review previous lessons

To nurture insights

To assess achievement or mastery of goals and objectives

To stimulate independent learning

A teacher may vary his or her purpose in asking questions during a single lesson, or a single question may have more than one purpose.

In general, research shows that instruction involving questioning is more effective than instruction without questioning. Questioning is one of the nine research-based strategies presented in Classroom Instruction That Works (Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock 2001).

One important finding is that questions that focus student attention on important elements of a lesson result in better comprehension than those that focus on unusual or interesting elements. Questions should also be structured so that most elicit correct responses.

TYPES OF QUESTIONS

Educators have traditionally classified questions according to Bloom's Taxonomy, a hierarchy of increasingly complex intellectual skills. Bloom's Taxonomy includes six categories:

Knowledge - recall data or information

Comprehension - understand meaning

Application - use a concept in a new situation

Analysis - separate concepts into parts; distinguish between facts and inferences

Synthesis - combine parts to form new meaning

Evaluation - make judgments about the value of ideas or products

Some researchers have simplified classification of questions into lower and higher cognitive questions. Lower cognitive questions (fact, closed, direct, recall, and knowledge questions) involve the recall of information. Higher cognitive questions (open-ended, interpretive, evaluative, inquiry, inferential, and synthesis questions) involve the mental manipulation of information to produce or support an answer.

Regardless of the classification, traditional wisdom holds that the higher cognitive questions lead to higher-quality answers and increased learning and achievement. However, the research has mixed conclusions in this area. Some studies found that higher level questions did indeed produce deeper learning, while others found that not to be the case.

According to some studies, lower cognitive questions (knowledge and comprehension on Bloom's Taxonomy) may be most beneficial for primary students. Lower cognitive questions are also more effective when the goal is to impart factual knowledge and commit it to memory.

This finding does not mean that primary teachers should avoid all higher cognitive questions. Certainly, primary students need to have chances to speculate, imagine, and manipulate the information being presented. Some research, however, suggests that for these youngest students, these questions should be used more sparingly.

Higher cognitive questions (application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) should make up a higher percentage of questions asked above the primary grades. Studies show that a combination of lower and higher questions is more effective than the exclusive use of one or the other. Increasing the use of higher cognitive questions can produce superior learning gains for older students, particularly those in secondary school, and does not reduce student performance on lower cognitive questions.

It is important to note, though, that simply asking these kinds of questions does not guarantee higher responses or greater learning gains. Students need explicit instruction in answering these types of questions, including making inferences. This instruction, in conjunction with the use of higher cognitive questions, can positively impact student achievement.

The use of a high frequency (50 percent or more) of higher cognitive questions with older students is positively related to increases in on-task behavior, length of student responses, the number of relevant contributions, the number of student-to-student interactions, student use of complete sentences, speculative thinking, and relevant questions posed by students.

HOW MANY QUESTIONS? WHEN?

How many questions should a teacher ask? And at what point during the lesson? Frequent questioning has been shown to be positively related to learning facts, but simply asking a greater number of questions does not facilitate the learning of more complex material. Just as with higher cognitive questions, it may be necessary to include explicit instruction to promote student learning of complicated concepts.

Teachers often pose questions prior to reading. Research shows that while this strategy is effective for older students, those with high ability, and those interested in the subject matter, it is not as effective for younger students and poor readers, who tend to focus only on the material that will help them answer the questions.

WAIT-TIME

Wait-time is another crucial factor in questioning techniques. Wait-time can be defined as the amount of time a teacher allows to elapse after he or she has posed a question. (A less frequently used and researched definition is the amount of time that a teacher allows to elapse before responding after a student stops speaking.) While traditional wisdom advocates a brisk pace of instruction to maintain interest and cover more material, research shows that slowing slightly to include more wait-time promotes achievement.

In the classrooms studied, the average wait-time after a question was posed was one second or less. Students perceived as slow or poor learners were afforded less wait-time than students viewed as more capable. This amount of wait-time is not sufficient for students, particularly for those that experience difficulty.

Studies show that for lower cognitive questions, a wait-time of three seconds is most effective in terms of achievement. Shorter or longer times were less positively correlated with student success.

For higher cognitive questions, no wait-time threshold was observed. Researchers noted that students seemed to become more engaged and successful the longer the teacher waited (within reason, of course).

Increased wait-time is related to a number of student outcomes, including improved achievement and retention, greater numbers of higher cognitive responses, longer responses, decreases in interruptions, and increased student-student interactions. These outcomes are quite similar to those observed with an increased frequency of higher cognitive questions. In fact, researchers believe that a causal relationship may exist between the two: higher cognitive questions require more wait-time, and more wait-time allows for the implementation of higher cognitive discussions.

FEEDBACK: REDIRECTING, PROBING, AND RESPONDING

A teacher's response to students' answers is just as important as the question asked. A response may redirect students when an incorrect answer is given or students misinterpret the question. Teachers may probe for further explanation when a partial answer is given. Finally, teachers may validate a correct response.

Research in this area shows that redirection and probing are effective when they are explicitly focused on student responses. Vague or critical feedback (such as "That's not right, try again") has been shown to be unrelated to achievement.

Acknowledging correct responses is necessary and effective. Praise that is used sparingly, is directly related to the response, and is sincere and credible is also positively related to student achievement.

IN CONCLUSION

How can teachers make use of these findings? Teachers often have little or no training in questioning techniques, so being familiar with the research is a good place to start. Improving in this area requires a reflective and metacognitive approach. For example, teachers may choose to:

Plan and write out the questions to be used in a lesson. How many are lower cognitive questions? Higher cognitive questions? Is the percentage appropriate for the age and ability level of your students?

Anticipate possible student responses, especially partially correct or incorrect ones. How will you probe for further information or redirect?

Ask a colleague to observe a lesson, paying particular attention to the types of questions and student responses. Meet to discuss the observations and plan for improvement.

Videotape yourself teaching a lesson. When you watch, record your wait-time for each question. Also note if you provide longer wait-times to certain students. Or examine your feedback. Are you specific and focused on the students' responses?

Seek out resources and professional development that can help you improve your questioning techniques. If possible, start a study group with colleagues.

RESOURCES FOR QUESTIONING TECHNIQUES

The following print and online resources can help you learn more about effective questioning techniques and implement them in your practice.

School Improvement Research Series: Classroom Questioning
This document from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory summarizes research findings on questioning techniques.

Effective Questioning Techniques
A list of 15 techniques for asking questions.

Applying Bloom's Taxonomy
This page provides verbs, sample question stems, and potential activities and products for each category of Bloom's Taxonomy. A great reference for planning or reflecting on a lesson.

The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom
This blog post discussing effective questioning techniques.

Asking Better Questions in the Classroom: Part 1

A 2:28 video discussing the difference between open-ended and close-ended questions. Includes examples.

Asking Better Questions: Part 2

In this follow-up video (2:11), learn about the difference between convergent and divergent questions.
Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement
In this book, the authors, Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane Pollock, examine and summarize decades of research findings and distill the results into nine broad teaching strategies (including Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers). Classroom examples, rubrics, organizers, and charts help teachers plan and implement the strategies into their own practice. View the table of contents, read a sample chapter, or purchase this book from the ASCD web site.
A Handbook for Classroom Instruction That Works
A companion to Classroom Instruction That Works, this handbook provides a review of the research base and strategies along with exercises, rubrics, and worksheets that help you begin using the nine strategies immediately. View the table of contents, read a sample chapter, or purchase this book from the ASCD web site.

REFERENCES

Cotton, K. 1989. Classroom questioning. School Improvement Research Series. Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/sirs/3/cu5.html.

Marzano, R., D. Pickering, and J. Pollock. 2001. Classroom instruction that works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
This article was written by Jessica Fries-Gaither. For more information, see the Contributors page. Email Jessica at Copyright October 2008 - The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0733024. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This work is licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons license. beyondpenguins@msteacher.org.

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Questioning Techniques: Research-Based Strategies for Teachers - Energy and the Polar Environment - Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears

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Questioning techniques are a heavily used, and thus widely researched, teaching strategy. Research indicates that asking questions is second only to lecturing. Teachers typically spend anywhere from 35 to 50 percent of their instructional time asking questions. But are these questions effective in raising student achievement?

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Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions

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Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions

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Volume 27, Number 5
September/October 2011

One small change can yield big results

Students in Hayley Dupuy's sixth-grade science class at the Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto, Calif., are beginning a unit on plate tectonics. In small groups, they are producing their own questions, quickly, one after another: What are plate tectonics? How fast do plates move? Why do plates move? Do plates affect temperature? What animals can sense the plates moving? They raise questions "that we never would have thought of if we started to answer the first question we asked," says one of the students. "And just when you think you already know the question you want to focus on, you realize: 'Oh, wow, here's this other question that is so much better, and that's really what you need to think about.'"

Far from Palo Alto, in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Mass., Sharif Muhammad's students at the Boston Day and Evening Academy (BDEA) have a strikingly similar experience. Many of them had transferred to BDEA for various reasons from other schools and had not always experienced much success as students. But working individually, they find that formulating their own questions engages them in a new way. One of the students observes: "When you ask the question, you feel like it's your job to get the answer, and you want to figure it out."

These two students-one in Palo Alto, the other in Roxbury-are discovering something that may seem obvious: When students know how to ask their own questions, they take greater ownership of their learning, deepen comprehension, and make new connections and discoveries on their own. However, this skill is rarely, if ever, deliberately taught to students from kindergarten through high school. Typically, questions are seen as the province of teachers, who spend years figuring out how to craft questions and fine-tune them to stimulate students' curiosity or engage them more effectively. We have found that teaching students to ask their own questions can accomplish these same goals while teaching a critical lifelong skill.

The Question Formulation Technique
Dupuy, Muhammad, and many other teachers are using a step-by-step process that we and our colleagues at the Right Question Institute have developed called the Question Formulation Technique (QFT). This technique helps students learn how to produce their own questions, improve them, and strategize on how to use them (see sidebar "Question Formulation Technique").

The origins of the QFT can be traced back 20 years to a dropout prevention program for the city of Lawrence, Mass., that was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. As we worked together to increase parent involvement in education, we heard parents state the same problem over and over again: "We're not going to the schools because we don't even know what to ask." Eventually, this problem led us to create a simple but powerful process that has been used effectively in a wide range of fields across the country and beyond. In health care, for example, research funded by the National Institutes of Health has shown that the QFT produces dramatic increases in levels of patient activation and improved patient-provider communication. In the classroom, teachers have seen how the same process manages to develop students' divergent (brainstorming), convergent (categorizing and prioritizing), and metacognitive (reflective) thinking abilities in a very short period of time.

Teachers can use the QFT at different points: to introduce students to a new unit, to assess students' knowledge to see what they need to understand better, and even to conclude a unit to see how students can, with new knowledge, set a fresh learning agenda for themselves. The technique can be used for all ages.

Students have used the QFT to develop science experiments, create their own research projects, begin research on a teacher-assigned topic, prepare to write an essay, analyze a word problem, think more deeply about a challenging reading assignment, prepare an interview, or simply get themselves "unstuck."

The QFT has six key steps:

Step 1: Teachers Design a Question Focus. The Question Focus, or QFocus, is a prompt that can be presented in the form of a statement or a visual or aural aid to focus and attract student attention and quickly stimulate the formation of questions. The QFocus is different from many traditional prompts because it is not a teacher's question. It serves, instead, as the focus for student questions so students can, on their own, identify and explore a wide range of themes and ideas. For example, after studying the causes of the 1804 Haitian revolution, one teacher presented this QFocus: "Once we were slaves. Now we are free." The students began asking questions about what changed and what stayed the same after the revolution.

Step 2: Students Produce Questions. Students use a set of rules that provide a clear protocol for producing questions without assistance from the teacher. The four rules are: ask as many questions as you can; do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of the questions; write down every question exactly as it was stated; and change any statements into questions. Before students start generating their questions, the teacher introduces the rules and asks the students to think about and discuss possible challenges in following them. Once the students get to work, the rules provide a firm structure for an open-ended thinking process. Students are able to generate questions and think more broadly than they would have if they had not been guided by the rules.

Step 3: Students Improve Their Questions. Students then improve their questions by analyzing the differences between open- and closed-ended questions and by practicing changing one type to the other. The teacher begins this step by introducing definitions of closed- and open-ended questions. The students use the definitions to categorize the list of questions they have just produced into one of the two categories. Then, the teacher leads them through a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of both kinds of questions. To conclude this step, the teacher asks the students to change at least one open-ended question into a closed-ended one, and vice versa, which leads students to think about how the phrasing of a question can affect the depth, quality, and value of the information they will obtain.

Step 4: Students Prioritize Their Questions. The teacher, with the lesson plan in mind, offers criteria or guidelines for the selection of priority questions. In an introduction to a unit, the instruction may be, "Choose the three questions you most want to explore further." When designing a science experiment, it may be, "Choose three testable questions." An essay related to a work of fiction may require that students select "three questions related to the key themes we've identified in this piece." During this phase, students move from thinking divergently to thinking convergently, zero in on the locus of their inquiry, and plan concrete action steps for getting information they need to complete the lesson or task.

Step 5: Students and Teachers Decide on Next Steps. At this stage, students and teachers work together to decide how to use the questions. One teacher, for example, presented all the groups' priority questions to the entire class the next day during a "Do Now" exercise and asked them to rank their top three questions. Eventually, the class and the teacher agreed on this question for their Socratic Seminar discussion: "How do poverty and injustice lead to violence in A Tale of Two Cities?"

Step 6: Students Reflect on What They Have Learned. The teacher reviews the steps and provides students with an opportunity to review what they have learned by producing, improving, and prioritizing their questions. Making the QFT completely transparent helps students see what they have done and how it contributed to their thinking and learning. They can internalize the process and then apply it in many other settings.

When teachers deploy the QFT in their classes, they notice three important changes in classroom culture and practices. Teachers tell us that using the QFT consistently increases participation in group and peer learning processes, improves classroom management, and enhances their efforts to address inequities in education. As teachers see this happen again and again, they realize that their traditional practice of welcoming questions is not the same as deliberately teaching the skill of question formulation. Or, as one teacher put it: "I would often ask my students, 'Do you have any questions,' but, of course, I didn't get much back from them." In his seven years of teaching, Muhammad also encouraged his Roxbury students to ask questions but had seen just how difficult that could be for them. After using the six-step process outlined above, he was struck by "how the students went farther, deeper, and asked questions more quickly than ever before."

One Significant Change
For teachers, using the QFT requires one small but significant shift in practice: Students will be asking all the questions. A teacher's role is simply to facilitate that process. This is a significant change for students as well. It may take a minimum of 45 minutes for students to go through all the steps the first time it is introduced in a classroom; but as they gain experience using the QFT, teachers find that the students can run through the process very quickly, in 10 to 15 minutes, even when working in groups.

The QFT provides a deliberate way to help students cultivate a skill that is fundamentally important for all learning. Teaching this skill in every classroom can help successful students to go deeper in their thinking and encourage struggling students to develop a new thirst for learning. Their questions will have much to teach us.

Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, codirectors of the Right Question Institute, are the authors of the forthcoming book Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions to be published in September 2011 by Harvard Education Press.

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Volume 27, Number 5 September/October 2011 One small change can yield big results Students in Hayley Dupuy's sixth-grade science class at the Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto, Calif., are beginning a unit on plate tectonics. In small groups, they are producing their own questions, quickly, one after another: What are plate tectonics?