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"Inquiry or interrogation? What if you asked your students which of these best describes their experience with classroom questioning? How do you think they would respond? My colleague Beth Sattes and I have posed this question to a wide range of students. The majority choose "questioning as interrogation" as the best fit for their experience. What makes them feel this way? Many believe that teachers ask questions to surface "right" answers, which students fear they don't know. Others think teachers ask questions mostly to find out who is paying attention - or not! Almost all students view follow-up questions as attempts to keep them on the "hot seat" and embarrass them for not knowing. And most perceive classroom questioning to be a competition that pits students against one another - Whose hand goes up first? Who answers most frequently? Very few students understand questioning as a process for collaborative exploration of ideas and a means by which teachers and students alike are able to find out where they are in their learning and decide on next steps. This is one of the primary themes running through our work."

"Paradoxically, when kids go to school they stop asking so many questions. "Children enter school as question marks and leave schools as periods," Berger said, quoting Neil Postman.* But why? There are a lot of understandable reasons why questioning drops off in school. Foremost among them is time. "Time really conspires against questioning," Berger said. "In the classroom there often isn't time to let kids ask their questions." And really good, deep questions often take a lot of time to unravel - more time than a harried teacher trying to cover all the curriculum often feels she can afford. And while time pressure is a very real part of teaching, not making time for questioning says a lot about how valuable it is to us. People make time for the things they value."

What are the traits of an essential question? The question probes a matter of considerable importance. The question requires movement beyond understanding and studying - some kind of action or resolve - pointing toward the settlement of a challenge, the making of a choice or the forming of a decision. The question cannot be answered by a quick and simple "yes" or "no" answer. The question probably endures, shifts and evolves with time and changing conditions - offering a moving target in some respects. The question may be unanswerable in the ultimate sense. The question may frustrate the researcher, may prove arid rather than fertile and may evade the quest for clarity and understanding.

"Working within an answers-based education system, and in a culture where questioning may be seen as a sign of weakness, teachers must go out of their way to create conditions conducive to inquiry. Here are some suggestions (based on input from question-friendly teachers, schools, programs, and organizations) on how to encourage more questioning in the classroom and hopefully, beyond it."

"To help kids separate fact from fiction, Newsela partnered with the American Press Institute in October of 2016. Now whenever kids read an article on their electronic device, in addition to their normal comprehension questions, they're prompted to ask questions about the article itself: Where do the facts come from? Is there a bias? What's missing from this piece? "That'll be like a mini-research project for the student," Coogan says. Teachers can ask kids probing questions about the outlet, including where it's headquartered, where it receives funding, and what affiliations its members might have. No one would go to such great lengths reading the morning paper, Coogan says, but it's meant to be overkill in order to instill healthy levels of skepticism. "It's a good exercise to always question the source of the information," she says."

We've done the math, and below you'll find the 100 most-commented-upon questions we've ever asked that call for persuasive writing. Many of them are, of course, on topics teenagers care about - technology, video games, sports and gender issues. Others are classic debate issues like government regulation and gun violence. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the broad topic that seems to engage students the most? School - from questions about homework to cheating, bad report cards, bullying and gym class. So skim the list and pick issues that interest you. Each question is linked to a related Times article, which you can access free, and includes additional subquestions to help you flesh out your ideas. "

"Language merely reflects our way of trying to make sense of the world. - Frank Smith Frank Smith (1982) says 'writing touches every part of our lives'. One of the first reasons we write is because it is a tool for communication in culture. It gives us the ability the share information over time and space with multiple individuals (explaining, recounting & opinion). It can also be used as a permanent record or as a statement e.g. in history, geography  & science genres. The third cultural aspect for writing is artistry (narrative and poetry). Finally, there is also the personal aspect to writing. Writing allows us all to reflect, express our perceptions of self, to socially dream or to be critical (memoir). By writing, we find out what we know; what we think. Ultimately though, writing is a means for us to express ourselves in the world, make sense of the world or impose ourselves upon it. The question now is why do children write at school? For these purposes? - Not often. There is a massive discrepancy between the writing done in the real-world and that of the classroom. Donald Graves says 'all children want to write'. It is just a case of allowing them to write about the things they are interested in. As Frank Smith says, 'all children can write if they can speak it.' If they can talk about it, they can write it down. The transmission of narrow decontextualized writing skills; that English is just a formal system to be learnt. The insistence on task-orientated writing. The insistence on teacher-chosen writing tasks. The insistence on the use of external stimulus (literature units, film-clips, topic-writing) at the expense of children's knowledge, interests, loves, talents and idiosyncrasies. The formal rather than functional teaching of grammar. These examples embody the 'commonsense' assumptions which claim an authority which is supposedly natural and unshakable. Writing in classrooms at present isn't seen by children as important

"At the American Press Institute (API), we put energy into helping news readers of any age understand and evaluate the news they encounter. In our work with youth and media, we generally recommend six basic questions that can be asked about the news you encounter: 1. Type: What kind of content is this - news, opinion, advertising or something else? 2. Source: Who and what are the sources cited, and why should I believe them? 3. Evidence: What's the evidence and how was it vetted? 4. Interpretation: Is the main point of the piece backed up by the evidence? 5. Completeness: What's missing? 6. Knowledge: Is there an issue here that I want to learn more about, and where can I do that? We are excited to partner with Newsela to offer a way for teachers to begin some of these thoughtful media literacy discussions with their students. Newsela has created an election Text Set that focuses squarely on media literacy. Every article in the set uses some of API's six questions as Annotations to encourage critical thinking - and teachers can use some, or all, of the six questions to guide classroom discussion."

Without question, Tom Robinson would be better off today. In fact, Tom Robinson could live a life completely unimaginable and unrecognizable to the characters in Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" - the groundbreaking book, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week.  No lynchings.  No all white male juries.  No presumption of guilt based on skin color.  No state-sanctioned discrimination. Yet, Tom would realize a sad, but undeniable truth -- that racism is still alive and all too well in contemporary America.  He would know it in the economic injustice that has left a disproportionate number of African-Americans -- 25 percent -- living in poverty.   He would see it in the criminal injustice that has left a disproportionate number of African-American men - 6 times the number of white, non-Hispanic men -- living in jails and prisons.  And he would feel it in the hate-filled, racist rhetoric that still defines too much of our political discourse - rhetoric that questions the Civil Rights Act, rhetoric that questions the birthplace of our President.

Love these questions as writing prompts. And if you have your students respond to them on the NY Times Learning Blog, it also becomes a writing for a real audience.

"The real question we should be asking is, "What do we believe should happen after the end of the school day to help ensure that students retain what they have learned and are primed to learn more?" Any answer with the word, "work" in its name, as in "homework," is not typically going to be met with eagerness or enthusiasm by students. Ideally, we want children to understand that they are always learners. In school, we refer to them as "students" but outside of school, as children, they are still learners. So it makes no sense to even advertise a "no homework" policy in a school. It sends the wrong message. The policy should be, "No time-wasting, rote, repetitive tasks will be assigned that lack clear instructional or learning purposes.""

"Some of us have been there. You have a room full of 30+ students, and you wonder how it is possible that so many kids or teenagers could actually be that quiet. Many avert their eyes, thinking that if they don't make eye contact, they can achieve the superpower of invisibility. Then, there are those five students who confidently and regularly raise their hands, waiting to be called on to answer the question that has been posed by the teacher. Regardless of the topic, regardless of the questions, it is usually the same five hands that sprout up each time. How can we improve our practice so that more engagement occurs for all students and not just the confident few? A successful discussion is typically dependent on two factors: the topic and the level of participation. How can we choose subjects for discussion that interest and yet educate students? How can we run our discussions so that all students have a voice?"

On Thursday, April 14, we'll be conducting a live-moderated discussion of a poem, using these three questions: What's going on in this poem? What do you see, or read, that makes you say that? What more can you find? Just as with our Monday forums, live moderation will take place from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern, although of course students and teachers will be welcome to continue commenting after that point."

""The best literary precedent for what we're enduring now is not the static image of Big Brother but the turbulent eruptions of King Lear," wrote the Washington Post's Ron Charles in May. Or is it The Handmaid's Tale, also an Amazon top seller? Or, maybe, Brave New World? America's high school English teachers are asking the same questions. After watching the tumult of the 2016 presidential election play out inside their classrooms last year, and after a summer of hate-filled violence, many are retooling the reading lists and assignments they typically give their students. They worry that the classic high school canon doesn't sufficiently cover today's most pressing themes-questions about alienation and empathy and power-and that the usual writing prompts aren't enough to get students thinking deeper than an average cable news segment."

"When we ask teachers what is their biggest obstacle in teaching writing, they often say "Time!"  Indeed, the time to fit everything in and do a good job with writing workshop is our greatest challenge.  There is no way to remove this obstacle from our daily challenges, so we must, as Rudyard Kipling tells us in his poem "If",  fill the "unforgiving minutes with sixty second worth of distance run…"  Perhaps the best way to do this is to begin with a set of questions we can ask ourselves as teachers of writers: How are we currently spending the limited time we are given? How can we revise the way we spend our time in workshop to be more effective/productive? Is this the right lesson for these students right now (a question we can ask ourselves daily)? Is this learning experience worthy of the time it will take us to do it right? Is there another way - a better way - to approach this concept/learning? What is essential here? Important to know? Necessary to learn as a stepping stone to the next concept/skill? How can we give students more opportunities to write? To have choice? What do our students need from us right now?"

"Teaching Mockingbird suggests a central question around which a class's study of Harper Lee's novel can be organized: What factors influence our moral growth? What kinds of experiences help us learn how to judge right from wrong?  As students read and reflect on the novel, they return to this question and can begin to make deeper and broader connections between the novel and their own moral and ethical lives. They begin by considering the pivotal moments in their lives that shape who they are and their senses of right and wrong.  Then they analyze how the characters in To Kill A Mockingbird change over the course of the story, identifying pivotal moments in the story that influence how the characters think about morality and justice.  The complete Teaching Mockingbird guide also introduces models of moral development that have emerged from the field of developmental psychology, which students can use as the basis for even deeper character analysis."

"Through hashtags, test takers have categorized tweets about different AP exams. #APLit for the AP Literature and Composition exam. #APBio for the AP Biology exam, and so on. While these tweets are in jest - and many in the format of popular memes -there is something peculiar about them: they are oddly specific. For example, in reference to the AP Literature and Composition exam, many users tweeted about Mr. Pickle and Godfrey. These tweets about the exam even inspired a Twitter moment that highlighted the best memes about the AP exam. A Twitter search of #APLit will yield similar results. All of these memes reference a specific short story published in 1751, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett. While the tweets express the sentiment of the students taking the exam, they do another thing: reference the questions asked of them on the AP Literature exam."

Homework studies - how much should kids do?

"The goal of any close reading is the following: an ability to understand the general content of a text even when you don't understand every word or concept in it. an ability to spot techniques that writers use to get their ideas and feelings across and to explain how they work. an ability to judge whether techniques the writer has used succeed or fail and an ability to compare and contrast the successes and failures of different writers' techniques. Remember-when doing a close reading, the goal is to closely analyze the material and explain why details are significant. Therefore, close reading does not try to summarize the author's main points, rather, it focuses on "picking apart" and closely looking at the what the author makes his/her argument, why is it interesting, etc. Here are a few of the helpful questions to consider in close reading, from the handout by  Kip Wheeler, a college English professor:"