Classroom Focus: Questioning the Question

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In preparing for the examination, it may be useful to get the students to
develop their own questions, based on what they know.


  • Begin the revision with Students Developing Questions: Have your class think of questions that could be asked about the exam topics.

  • Create a Taxonomy of Questions: When students begin to label the different kinds of questions, they learn to select different kinds of questions to perform different kinds of thinking. No matter what the level of schooling, some kind of label can work effectively.

  • Ask Students to Create Questions as Homework (this would work with the Flipped Classroom): Put your classroom questioning typology to work with their examination preparation. If students read a question, let them form extension questions for the next day's discussion.

Try these six key steps:


  1. Teachers Design a Question Focus. The Question Focus is a prompt that can be presented in the form of a statement or a visual or aural aid to focus and attract student attention and quickly stimulate the formation of questions. The Focus is different from many traditional prompts because it is not a teacher's question. It serves, instead, as the focus for student questions so students can, on their own, identify and explore a wide range of themes and ideas.

  2. Students Produce Questions. Students use a set of rules that provide a clear protocol for producing questions without assistance from the teacher. The four rules are: ask as many questions as you can; do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of the questions; write down every question exactly as it was stated; and change any statements into questions.

  3. Students Improve Their Questions. Students then improve their questions by analyzing the differences between open, closed, and other types of questions and by practicing changing one type to the other.

  4. Students Prioritize Their Questions. You, with the examination answer in mind, offer criteria or guidelines for the selection of priority questions.

  5. Students and Teachers Decide on Next Steps. At this stage, you and your students work together to decide how to use the questions.

  6. Students Reflect on What They Have Learned. You review the steps and provides your students with an opportunity to review what they have learned by producing, improving, and prioritizing their questions. Making the process completely transparent helps students see what they have done and how it contributed to their thinking and learning. They can internalize the process and then apply it in many other settings.



Developed from: Learners Should Be Developing Their Own Essential Questions by Jackie Gerstein, Ed.D
See also this interesting site: ChangingMinds.org: Questioning

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