Ask Better Questions

I received surprisingly little training on how to ask questions, considering how many darn questions I asked!

Sharpening Questions

With some small changes, we can turn fluffy opinion questions into thought-provoking evaluation questions.

Tweaks To A Character Study

A teacher sent me a sequence of questions about the story My Father’s Dragon. Based on what you’ve read so far, what is one word you could use to describe Elmer? What from the story made you choose this word? Think of other books you’ve read. What character from another story you know is similar […]

Question Renovation Techniques

A few techniques I found myself using as I renovated old questions from my classroom.

Evaluate with Academic Tournaments

The bracketed tournament isn’t just for college basketball. Set up a tournament to determine best president, state, element, or literary character and challenge your students to make interesting judgements.

Depth and Complexity: ❓Unanswered Questions

By far, ❓Unanswered Questions was the prompt that I under-utilized with my own class. Now I see it in a whole new light, and boy is there immense power in prompting students to note and explore truly unanswered questions.

Fluency: Asking For (Way) More Than One Answer

Being able to generate many possible answers is key to high-level thinking. So why don’t we ask students to do it more often?

The Resiliency Tournament

I got to work with several groups of students (of many ages) and I tried out this task: building a tournament to decide who was the most resilient historical figure or fictional character? Kids came up with some amazing ideas.

Divergent Questions (How To Ask ‘Em)

How to ask Divergent Questions and ensure that your students are thinking rather than merely remembering.

Why I don’t include “Explain Why” in Questions

I used to think that adding “explain why” to the end of a question somehow made it higher-level. But now I see two problems in asking students to “explain their thinking”.

Puzzlement Tournament

Perfect to wrap up the year: a four-round puzzlement tournament.