eCYBERMISSION is a web-based STEM
competition, free for students in grades 6-9.
Compete for awards up to $9,000 in
U.S. Savings Bonds.
Registration opens in August 2015
www.ecybermission.com
Incorporate STEM into your classroom
with eCYBERMISSION!
it makes you think more. And, you have
to pull stuff out of your brain, and when
you do that you have to remember it
again. And, the more you take it out and
remember it again, the deeper it gets
into your brain and the easier it is to
remember it.
A Shortcut, Not a Detour
Getting students to start producing
questions can be the most difficult
step in making questioning come alive
in the classroom. It can be a shock
to the system. But when students do
start asking questions, the change is
palpable.
With so much content to cover,
teachers sometimes fear making a
detour to commit class time to devel-
oping students’ ability to ask ques-
tions. They soon discover, however,
that having students create questions
is a shortcut to deeper learning. As
students become more curious and
engaged and take on new ownership of
their learning they will leave school as
sophisticated questioners who can use
the skill of question formulation in
higher education, the workplace, their
lives, and our democracy. EL
1Evans, R. (2014, November 18). It’s
their class now! Building classrooms of
curiosity [blog post]. Retrieved from the
Right Question Institute at http://right
question.org/blog/class-building-class
rooms-curiosity
2Corrigan, J. (2013, November 11).
Increasing rigor in an elementary math
classroom [blog post]. Retrieved from the
Right Question Institute at http://right
question.org/teaching-strategy-elementary-math
Copyright © 2015 Dan Rothstein, Luz
Santana, and Andrew P. Minigan
Dan Rothstein (dan@rightquestion
.org) and Luz Santana (luz@right
question.org) are codirectors of the
Right Question Institute, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and coauthors of Make
Just One Change: Teach Students to
Ask Their Own Questions (Harvard Education Press, 2011). Andrew P. Minigan
( andrew.minigan@rightquestion.org) is
a research fellow at the Right Question
Institute.
The very act of
producing questions
can be a challenge
for many students.
