By deepening students' discussion skills, schools can play a key role in bridging communication divides in our society. As the nation has become increasingly politically polarized, how can educators teach constructive dialogue in the classroom? The authors--education experts and researchers--offer seven strategies for helping students engage in…

As more classrooms return to in-person instruction, many teachers are longing for lessons built around student discussion. Student discourse frequently floundered over the past year amidst inconsistent camera usage, weak microphones, internet lags, and the overall awkwardness of virtual classrooms. The Socratic seminar is a particularly seductive…

Masterful teachers don't just ask a lot of questions; they ask questions in a purposeful way. In this article, Costa and Kallick describe five strategies that can help teachers become more purposeful in designing and posing questions. One strategy is to plan questions that elicit student thinking at various cognitive levels, from simple recall of…

Marge Scherer describes this issue of "Educational Leadership" as being all about questioning for learning--how to ask questions of students, how to encourage students to ask their own questions, and how to ask better questions and find better answers. Among feature topics explored in this issue are why children, who start questioning…

"Memorizing facts is boring. Drill-and-practice is boring. But thinking, for most students most of the time, is actually fun," writes Susan M. Brookhart. The author recommends that teachers build interest and engagement into every lesson plan by creating opportunities for deep thinking. She describes three strategies to accomplish this.…

Why is the teacher asking why? so much? Why is the teacher not calling on Mary and John, who have their hands up? And why is the teacher putting all answers on the white board, even the wrong ones? Students may struggle with such questions if they're unfamiliar with questioning techniques that seek to promote student learning, as opposed to…

Recent research shows that reading comprehension relies heavily on prior knowledge. Far more than generic "reading skills" like drawing inferences, making predictions, and knowing the function of subheads, how well students learn from a nonfiction text depends on their background knowledge of the text's subject matter. And in a cyclical…

"Reader, say something smart. Right now. Share a deep insight or a subtle point. Quick. No? OK (with obvious disappointment), I'll come back to you later. Anybody else?" We've all experienced this in school, the author notes--the teacher giving up, concluding that we weren't going to say something smart in the allotted…

Teachers love to see the spark of engagement when students eagerly engage in learning. But when teachers work with English language learners in the earliest stages of language acquisition, they're often unsure how to foster challenge and engagement with students who know such sparse English. Hill shares six key do's and don'ts for classroom…

Multiple-choice questions draw criticism because many people perceive they test only recall or atomistic, surface-level objectives and do not require students to think. Although this can be the case, it does not have to be that way. Susan M. Brookhart suggests that multiple-choice questions are a useful part of any teacher's questioning repertoire…

By simply asking students how they got the answer to a problem, math teachers can open the door to stimulating discussions in class. But how can they make sure those discussions promote mathematical understanding? Allison Hintz and Elham Kazemi explain that teachers need to know what the goal is for a discussion and plan accordingly. The authors…

English teacher Cris Tovani knows from her experiences teaching elementary school that students are naturally curious. But, too often, students are so trained to be question answerers that by the time they reach high school, they no longer form questions of their own and instead focus on trying to figure out what answer the teacher wants. Tovani…

Good essential questions rarely emerge in the first draft. Common first-draft questions typically are convergent low-level questions designed to support content acquisition. They either point toward the one official "right" answer, or they elicit mere lists and thus no further inquiry. So how can teachers ensure that subsequent drafts…

According to Dylan Wiliam, the traditional classroom practice in which a teacher asks a question, students raise their hands, and the teacher calls on a volunteer does not actually provide much useful information--and it may even impede learning. When teachers ask questions in this way, they're only engaging the most confident students in the…

In this article, Alfie Kohn discusses four questions about questioning--starting with questions that are more basic, and progressing to some that are "deeper and potentially more subversive of traditional schooling." He begins by considering what questions we should ask students, and encourages teachers to keep questions with…