How to question - that is the question!

 Thinking about questioning strategies is something I still need to do further work on. I am the ultimate offender of asking those "yes" or "no" questions and then stopping. I get freaked out and forget that those are not really questions - I mean they are...but they are not higher order questions that require deeper thinking and dialogue between your students.

I located a cool resource for questioning strategies at Minds In Bloom. These are all questions that can be used during literature circles, on quizzes, or during class discussions. The nice thing is that these questions can be applied to any book, short story - anything the students are reading and the structure of them lends them to those higher level of thinking that we are all striving for our students to achieve.

I got to experience one questioning technique which encourages students to question each other, and it was really cool. It was called "Say Something Reading Circles." You split the students into groups of 3 to 5. Student 1 read one page of text. When they finish, student 2 shares a question, idea, or anything that they want to inquire more about after listening to the paragraph. Maybe it was asking why an author made a certain word choice - or maybe they don't understand WHAT they just listened to! Anyone in the group then responds to what student 2 says. Then student 2 reads the next page, and this continues until all the students have had an opportunity to read and pose something for discussion. Granted, it's a rather slow process when reading a novel, but the dialogue that the students came up with was really great, and they enjoyed it quite a bit! Personally, I could see myself using this with short stories at first, having students read maybe a paragraph or a stanza of a poem, to get their feet wet, then maybe use it with a novel.

I also really liked the "Pause, Pose, Pounce, and Bounce" technique that I saw on the NSEAD.org website. The steps are:

Pose – Teacher poses the question as a big question for all to consider and form a response to.
Pause – Teacher gives thinking time and possibly discussions/thinking together.
Pounce – Teacher selects who will provide and answer (no hands and not hands up).
Bounce – Teacher ‘bounces’ the answers from student to student developing the ideas/encouraging all to add their views or extend the e.g. depth and breadth of answers.

Again, it's all about getting the students to think deeper and converse with each other about the material you are discussing.

We are all still learning, so - take a risk. Try one! Find more!