Educational Leadership - September 2015

Are questioners born or made? What happens to the “born questioners” when they enter school at 5 years old? Do they become “unmade questioners”? Or maybe we should be asking this: What can we do to ensure that by the time all students leave high school, they’re proficient at asking questions?

The problem is, as one teacher told us, “getting students to ask questions feels like pulling teeth.” So how can teachers transform that feeling and create classrooms that come alive with questions?

It requires two simple changes.

First, teachers need to give students both a
structure and the opportunity to practice gen-
erating and working with their own questions.

The very act of producing questions, however,
can be a challenge for many students. We have,
therefore, made it the very first step in our
Question Formulation Technique, a deceptively
simple process we created for teaching all people,
no matter their level of education, how to ask
better questions. By going through the steps of
the process, students learn to think divergently,
convergently, and metacognitively.

We’ve found that by beginning with the following four rules for producing questions, we can create the space and structure that allows all people to start asking questions:

1. Ask as many questions as you can.

2. Don’t stop to judge, discuss, or answer any question.

3. Write down every question exactly as stated. 4. Change any statements into questions.

It would be great if the first rule would suffice. But the three rules that follow are necessary to jump-start question asking because they make it safe to pose questions, ensure rigor in paying careful attention to the actual wording of the questions, and promote the divergent thinking that’s required to produce a wide range of questions.

The second change needed to get students asking more questions relates to the teacher’s role. Teachers shouldn’t communicate a judgment too quickly about the quality of the students’