Educational Leadership - September 2015

n his book 10% Happier (2014), Dan Harris
observes that the little voice in our heads,
our internal narrator, can sometimes be
“creative, generous, or funny” and can at other
times be a “malicious puppeteer,” destroying our
self-confidence (p. viii). The key to happiness, he
argues, is redirecting this voice to become more
encouraging and focused.

The same might be said for students: Helping them tame the voice in their heads while learning can make all the difference.

Although teacher questioning techniques are important to student success, a large body of research suggests that good questions are even more important within the private world of students’ minds.

The concept of self-questioning while learning has been around for quite some time. Self-questioning is considered a metacognitive strategy. It’s the voice in our heads that assesses where we are with our learning. It says things like, Wait, I don’t get this.

Generating this voice is something effective learners appear to do naturally. For example, if you’re watching a science show on TV and hear an astronomer explain that much of the starlight in the night sky emanates from stars that may no longer exist, a little voice in your head might say,

Wait, I don’t get that as you grab the remote and back up the program.

Metacognitive self-questions help us connect what we’re learning with our prior knowledge (Oh, now I remember—starlight travels at the speed of light), the process at the heart of all learning.

They can also help us look for big ideas that guide our learning and connect it back to ourselves ( The universe is unfathomably large and ever-expanding;

I feel really small now). And they can lead to other
questions that further guide learning (How exactly
do astronomers measure the distance of faraway
stars?).

A Strong Research Base

In 1991, Alison King set out to see whether self-
questioning, which had been demonstrated to
effectively support reading comprehension, could
have equally powerful effects on student compre-
hension of oral lectures. She wondered whether it
would be too distracting for
students to ask themselves
questions while listening to
a lecture. She also wondered
whether students could inter-
nalize the strategy.
King trained a class of 9th
graders to ask themselves
higher-order comparison-
contrast questions (like, How
are Shintoism and Buddhism
alike?); causal-relationship
questions (How did the rise
of the Shogun affect Japanese
development and culture?); and analysis questions
(Which king was best for England?) while listening
to history lectures. She also gave them “question
starters” to model the sort of questions they could
ask themselves during lectures and taught them
about metacognition, including how to ask them-
selves questions like, What do I still not understand
about this?

After these students listened to a series of lectures, one group of trained students used the questions they had generated in cooperative-learning groups; another used the questions for individual self-reflection. A third group, the control group, had received no instruction on self-questioning before the lectures. They simply reviewed the lecture material independently or in unstructured peer groups.