Questioning Skills and Strategies Planner
Team Planning
Date:
Goal: To understand that different types of questions require different thinking skills.
(predicting, concluding, comparing, analyzing, hypothesising)
To develop skills in framing and asking essential questions and supporting
questions
Topic: Questioning
Curriculum Area: Integrated
Structure of session:
• What happens during the questioning stage?
• What are the teacher / student expectations?
• What specific activities can we use to explicitly teach the skills of
questioning?
• How are we going to manage the questioning stage?
• What will be the timeframe?
Activities:
Framing An Essential Question With Children
Initially this would be done by the teacher.
To model how an essential question can be developed with students and to determine the
area of interest, the teacher can read text that has a contestable concept within it eg/
truth, power, justice, beauty. Ask students to think of anything that might puzzle them or
make them wonder. At the end of reading, students ask their questions. These questions
can be grouped and then a choice is made about which grouping they would like to
discuss further. (group similar questions to see area of major interest, weed out questions
that have easy answers and put to one side as these maybe useful when developing
supporting questions and group inappropriate or impossible to answer questions)
Asking Supporting Questions With Children
Discuss and clarify the essential question. “What is this question asking?”
What are some of the key words / phrase? (children may need to think of synonyms or
related words for the key words)
“What will we need to know to answer this question?” (use questioning tools to help
frame their supporting questions)
For example:
Essential question: What can we do to make sure we have plenty of marine life to enjoy
both now and in the future.
Keywords / phrases – marine life, future, enjoy, what can we do?, plenty
Synonyms or related words – fish, ocean life, leisure, fun (enjoy) long term (future)
Supporting questions:
What is marine life?
How do we enjoy marine life?
When is the future? What is the future?
Do we have plenty of marine life? How are we losing our marine life?
Are people doing anything to conserve our marine life?
Children may have many questions, where they will need to group, eliminate, refine and
make decisions.
Activities to Practise Questioning
“How can we encourage student thinking through asking better questions?”
Students learn about questioning by practising generating questions of their own.
What’s in the …?
Teacher could use a lunchbox and get children to ask questions to find out what is in the
lunchbox (good during a healthy foods unit)
Teacher could also use a secret present, where children use the 5W’s and H or 7
servants (includes ‘which’) to find out what’s in the secret box. This activity is a great
‘hook’ when beginning a topic. (immersion stage)
Invitations / letters
Children ask appropriate questions to a party invitation or class trip. They then include this
information when making an invitation or writing a permission letter to parents.
What’s Your Question Line?
While children are reading their book, ask them to write questions to ask their group. Their
questions must be:
‘on the line’ (answers found straight from text),
‘between the line’ (where children will have to infer)
‘Beyond the line’ (where children will need to evaluate or predict)
Resources
Using Texts to ask Philosophical Questions. (PDF file)
Questioning To Encourage Deeper Thinking (Word doc)
Question Frames handout
Developing supporting questions (Word doc)
On the line handout
Why Teach Questioning Skills handout
http://questioning.org/articles.html
http://www.fno.org/nov97/toolkit.html
(interesting articles on questioning, written by Jamie McKenzie)
The question dice
Fat/skinny questions
Questions cards
Questioning Tools
Use Q matrix
A question matrix is a simple and effective way to get learners to ask a range of questions
and to start thinking about effective questioning. During ‘oral language’ or a talk from a
guest speaker hand out a question matrix to each of the children. Get them to highlight a
square each (e.g. “where did…?”). Their main focus for the news/ informative talk will be
to listen for an answer to a question that starts with “where did…?”. If this is not covered
during the talk, they will need to pose a question for the speaker using that question
starter.
Question Frames
These could be made into cards and used as a resource during reading time or group /
class discussions.
7 Servants – When, where, how, why, what, who, which?
( a questioning cube with 6 question starters could be made)
De Bono’s Thinking Hats
Blooms Taxonomy
Inspiration / Kidspiration
Great for children to be able to group, eliminate and refine questions. They could also add
their hypothesised answers to the brainstorm.
