

I teach students about clarifying, critical thinking and inference questioning. Explain and model the different types of questions.I thought that students would (and should) naturally ask questions and grow through accessing prior knowledge. At first, I didn’t like the idea of helping students form their questions. Providing sentence stems gives them a starting point.

Some students have a really hard time with questioning strategies. Is it any wonder that younger kids are more likely to ask random questions? Include blocks of time in your day to allow students to play, explore, and discover. I find it sad that students often get blocks of play time only when they are younger. Wonder is both something we can promote in schools but also something we can allow – and the best way we allow this to happen is by promoting play. Instead of spending time on ice breakers or excessive time on procedures, we spend time on learning to ask better questions. Practice it often. I’ve had success with students doing mock interviews, fake press conferences, and rotating discussion zones in the first week of school.Sometimes I’ll ask a really lame question and then say, “Someone tell my why that question sucked” or I’ll ask a deeper question and say, “Why was that a hard question to answer?” The goal is to get them to see deeper questions and to also think about why a question is deep or shallow. This happens during read alouds, but also during class discussions. In the first week of school, I model the types of questions that require deeper thinking. Can you change it so that you draw a longer response?” When all questions are being analyzed, students learn to write things like, “This question is deep, but it’s worded in a way that elicits a short answer response. It might sound harsh, but it doesn’t have to be.

Students highlight one another’s questions in Google Docs and leave comments on their blogs with very specific feedback. Every lesson should include students asking questions to you, to one another or to themselves-and the boldest of students will ask questions of the world through social media and personal interviews. This applies to analyzing mathematical processes, thinking through social issues, making sense out of a text or analyzing the natural world for cause and effect. Make this your mantra! As long as a question is respectful, allow students to question their world. But how do we actually make that happen? Here are a few places to start: In fact, we are convinced that this is where learning begins. We want to see kids asking tons of questions.
#SOCIAL QUESTIONS FOR STUDENTS HOW TO#
How to Help Students Ask Better Questions They can build on their prior knowledge and build a bridge to new information that they are analyzing. When students are able to ask their own questions, they can chase their curiosity and tap into their own interests. Student inquiry is at the heart of student choice.
