Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions (Harvard Ed. Newsletter)

http://www.hepg.org/hel/article/507#home

Teacher: Any questions?
Students: Uh....no?

The importance of students being able to generate good questions has been on my mind for a while and I was happy to see that there is a movement to emphasize this more in education.

When my students start a project for writing or reading, it is extremely important that they are generating questions actively on their own. Of course, I can give them writing prompts or reading discussion questions, but I have refrained from this more and more because I believe that always "giving" questions limits the growth of this key ability within the students. As teachers, I think we need to give the initiative to students and say "You create your writing prompt" "You create the discussion questions" "You develop the research questions to guide the project".

The link above has something called QFT, Question Formation Technique, in six steps.

1. Teachers design a focus - "Let's talk about intercultural communication"
2. Students generate/ask their questions - "Is it important? Why?" etc.
3. Students improve their questions - Change limited, closed questions to more specific, developed, or open-ended ones etc. that can help develop more understanding:  Is it important? --> Why should students know about intercultural communication? How can we use it in the future?
4. Students prioritize their questions - This is very important from my experience. In group discussions, students tend to see all questions as the same importance, but within a limited discussion or meeting time, the most significant or interesting questions have to be prioritized.
5. Students and teacher decide how to proceed with using the questions - start research, discuss them together etc.
6. Reflect on the process above. What was useful? What was difficult.

The authors Rothstein and Santana direct a microdemocracy institute that helps disadvantaged persons ask the right questions to promote advocacy on key issues. Their book Make Just one Change about how to help students ask questions seems very interesting as well.