Q Tasks: How to Empower Students to Ask Questions and Care about Answers

Learning begins with perplexity. In fact, some forms of teaching (the Socratic Method) rely entirely on the teacher asking questions. Students also understand things more if they ask questions rather than just go through the memorization-and-recall routine. But how is the teacher to pull this off? Many ideas and methods are presented in this book. To begin with, the student can complete a "How Curious are You?" self-survey. The teacher can provoke thinking with statements such as: "I am thinking about something that is green." A set of question drivers are provided for book reports. One of the questions is: "What made the plot believable?" Detailed questions related to compare-and-contrast activities are also provided. Instructions are given for constructing a Wonder Wheel. The "I wonder..." can be combined with: who, where, why, why, what, etc. Colored hats can be used to represent different student approaches to questioning, such as the student wearing a red hat examining the emotions and feelings in a story, a student wearing a black hat focusing on the negative aspects of a story, etc. Question-building matrices are included. For instance, the: who, what, when... can be successively combined with: is, did, can, would, will, might. Different sets of helpful websites are featured. For example, there are websites that make it easy for the teacher to ask questions through tailor-made crossword puzzles.

This is a great book. It's an easy read with great ideas for the classroom.