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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.

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.

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.

 Instead of spending time on ice breakers or excessive time on procedures, we spend time on learning to ask better questions.   

Scaffolding: Some students have a really hard time with questioning strategies.  So, initially I give sentence stems.  At first this was really hard for me.  I thought that students would naturally ask questions and grow through accessing prior knowledge.  I quickly realized that language acquisition had often been a barrier in asking better questions.  So, sentence stems and sample questions became a way that ELL students could modify questions and access the language. 

As one of the primary goals of education is to develop autonomous but interdependent thinkers, students deserve frequent opportunities to shape and direct classroom inquiry. To fuel this inquiry, it is also essential that we validate the importance of curiosity in the process of learning. While curiosity may have killed the cat, there is no reason for us to kill curiosity

Critical to all of these activities, however, is some kind of guided practice in how to think through such questions.