As a teacher, I didn't know how to ask questions well! I had basically no training. But I asked hundreds each day. Now, I'm renovating my embarrassingly bad old questions!
A few techniques I found myself using as I renovated old questions from my classroom.
Beware one-off questions. Any question that we prepare should have a natural follow-up question. And those follow-ups should push students up Bloom’s Taxonomy.
With some small changes, we can turn fluffy opinion questions into thought-provoking evaluation questions.
When I look back at the questions I asked students, one thing really pops out. I did not try answering my own questions. As a result, my students got untested rough drafts.
My kid and I just read A Wrinkle In Time. Well, I read it to him. And he’s six, so we used the graphic novel. At the end of this version, there is a page of Discussion Questions. See how many of our recurring questioning problems you spot: The Nine Questions Since the photo is […]
As a new teacher, I’d often present a famous quotation to students. Something like: Neither a borrower not a lender be. ~ Benjamin Franklin Then, I had two questions I might ask: What do you think Ben Franklin meant by this? What does this mean to you? Neither question is very good! I regret using […]
A teacher sent in a sequence of questions they had developed. Who is the primary antagonist in your novel? What makes this antagonist effective? How does the antagonist cause problems for the protagonist/other characters? What antagonist from another story, movie, or game is similar? If you could give the protagonist one gift to help him […]
Here is an embarrassingly low-level pair of questions I asked my students: What was the problem in this story? How was the problem solved? Now, it is technically a sequence of questions. But my students are stuck at the lowest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I’m going to get the same responses from even my most […]
Here’s a Depth and Complexity question I found on an old worksheet: What title would you give this chapter? Explain why your title fits the chapter’s 🏛️ Big Idea. Sure, I’m using Depth and Complexity. But how am I asking students to think? Bloom’s Taxonomy is much more important than Depth and Complexity. (And it’s not […]
How to add a couple of Analyze-level tasks to this Synthesize activity.
I asked my students to read a poem. Then they had to: Paraphrase each line of the poem. Write your version next to the original line So, I’m not going to get into the pointlessness of this task. I had a room of the most brilliant 6th graders in town and this is what we […]
I often see this question on language arts and social studies worksheets: “Put these events in order.” Yes, it’s low-level, but the real problem is that it’s a one-off. Let’s make a sequence of questions about the order of events.
How can I go beyond asking 20 variations of 622 + 77 = ___?
A big ol’ table that looks like comparing, but it’s really more about remembering.