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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Teaching Students to Ask Questions

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Students need to know how to ask questions.  If you teach in the state of Louisiana and are being evaluated by  "COMPASS" you know exactly how important this is to your evaluation.  Sad...huh?

I am guilty of being a question "asker."  It probably bothers those around me but I've never been satisfied with being told the bare bones of something.  I want to know more. 

Many students that I work with are deficit in this area.  Daily I hear questions being "asked" without question structure.  So I have begun to teach questioning structure to a group of 3rd graders. 
 
This is what we have done so far:
We have talked about the importance of questions and how we are going to study and use the structure.
We have brainstormed and charted "question words."
I do We do You do technique has been used.
I have modeled questioning.
We have practiced together.
You have tried independent questioning using a story passage and partner Kagan stuctures.

I intend to use this pattern over and over so that the students can master knowledge level questioning and then work toward higher order thinking and questioning.

If you are teaching struggling learners, please realize that they need distributed practice all through the day with multiple exposure to the questioning techniques.  This is true for most, if not all materials we expect the struggling learner to learn.

Please do not be one of the teachers who says "Well, I taught that last week!"
You haven't taught it until they have learned it.
Teacher, you are soooo important and have an immeasurable ability to impact your students lives.

I applaud you!



1 comment:

  1. Yes! The importance of asking question is often overlooked in schools. You provide some great insight here and I would love to hear more about your results using this technique. I also invite you to check out http://www.hepg.org/hel/article/507 for a description of the Question Formulation Technique as developed by the Right Question Institute. I hope you find it interesting and helpful. Thank you so much for your post!

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