Because of this, there are many professional development opportunities available for teachers that are designed to teach you how to question in just the right way, with just the right combination of depth of thinking stems and follow up prompts. I have rarely been to a workshop or read an article about good questioning strategies that I did not find thought provoking and inspiring for teachers. In fact, I still have a variety of flipcharts and organizers from my days in the classroom designed to help teachers craft the perfect question to launch students into the highest levels of critical thinking. This type of training however is not essential for a teacher to be able to pose high level thinking questions to his or her students. In fact it is really pretty easy if you can just remember these four words: what, why, how, wait.
What, why, how, wait simply translates into three thought energizing questions and one critical principle of questioning students.
Ask,
1. What do you think (believe, predict, conclude, etc)?
2. Why do you think (believe, predict, conclude, etc) that?
3. How do you know this?
Then,
4. Wait for students to respond.
There are certainly many other interesting avenues of understanding to explore when it comes to questioning and the brain – but you can ratchet up the level of thinking in your classroom immediately by throwing in these three questions and then allowing students the time to think about and formulate a response. Waiting is important. All too often, teachers unintentionally interfere with learning by cutting short the time a student needs to critically process his or her response. When appropriate, teachers can even purposefully build wait time into the lesson by incorporating discussion and brainstorming activities such as a simple think-pair-share. Who knew crafting high level questions could be so easy? If you aren’t already asking these questions of your students, why not take a chance and try it today?
The following article by educational blogger Rebecca Alber also explores this concept, taking things a step further by sharing five powerful questions to ask you students:
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/five-powerful-questions-teachers-ask-students-rebecca-alber?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=blog-simple-questions-repost
For an explanation of how to use the think-pair-share strategy as an excellent complement to high level questioning in the classroom, click the following ReadWriteThink link:
http://www.readwritethink.org/professional-development/strategy-guides/using-think-pair-share-30626.html