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.