Ask Better Questions
I received surprisingly little training on how to ask questions, considering how many darn questions I asked!
When A Math Puzzle Isn’t Very Puzzling
It looks like a fun puzzle. But it’s actually just a low-level worksheet in disguise!
A Depth and Complexity ELA Worksheet with Problems
Here’s a Depth and Complexity worksheet I used to use with my students: I look at it now and shudder. I was making so many mistakes here. Let’s just zoom out and imagine that I asked the same questions at a book club with fellow adults. Me: What is this story’s main theme? Him: Oh, […]
Don’t Just List ⚖️ Ethical Issues
Let’s improve this “make a list” question to incorporate high level thinking.
Beware Vague Questions
I’ve been doing tons of work to re-write old questions. You can see all of my updated questions here and, since you’re a Depth and Complexity person, you can see my Depth and Complexity re-writes here. I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting how I can fix my bland, low-level questions. But one problem is un-fixable. […]
Introducing Ourselves With Depth and Complexity and Frames
A go-to activity to introduce the prompts of depth and complexity to students while they also introduce themselves to their new classmates.
Climbing Blooms With A Science Lesson
How I’d push a mere science demonstration to higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Curiosity Skill: Encouraging Students to Ask Other Students
If you want to make a massive change in the culture of your classroom, move from teachers asking students all of the questions to students asking each other questions!
How long should we wait after asking a question?
I might ask the best questions in the world, but if I don’t give students even three seconds to think, those questions aren’t doing their job. Here’s what we know about Wait Time.
Ask Sequences, Never One-Off Questions
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.
Inquiry Training: Teach Students To Ask Better Questions
Inquiry Training is a model of instruction that looks a lot like 20 Questions. You’ll teach your students to ask more helpful questions and to avoid rushing to a hypothesis too quickly.
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.
Creating Better Research Questions
Once students have a topic they’d like to research, how do we help them form more interesting questions?
Four Types of Questions You Can Ask
Asking questions is such a basic tool of teaching, yet how many of us have ever been taught to ask good questions? In this opening to a series about questioning, we’ll explore how to get students asking each other questions.
Introducing “Criteria” To Students
Teaching our students to identify the criteria behind a decision will make them better decision makers and help them understand others’ points of views.
Upgrading Questions with Key Words
How adding a single “key word” can upgrade your questions to a whole new level.
Evaluating Characters on a Graph
Here’s an idea to integrate two-dimensional graphing with deep character analysis. Use the right characters, and you’ve got an exciting debate on your hands. Plus, it leads to a beautiful product that’s perfect for Open House.
Group Investigation: Lessons Built on Curiosity
John Dewey’s Group Investigation is a favorite model of instruction of mine. It’s simply built on curiosity!
Ask Creative Questions
Is this the message I want to give to my gifted students? “Follow the directions?” This is a room full of students who are creative, flexible, divergent thinkers. These are the future Noble Laureates, inventors, and revolutionaries. Let’s allow them (or better yet: force them) to exercise their creative muscles.
How I’d Change this Question from my Textbook
Here are a dozen ways to transform a not-so-critical-thinking question from one of my district’s textbooks.