​Asking important questions is essential to learning and critical thinking.  The quality of our questions will determine the quality of our answers.  My class places a lot of emphasize on asking significant questions that will produce deep, broad, and significant answers. 

Essential Questions for the Year or "Throughlines"

At the start of the year my class examines a set of essential questions that we will contemplate over the course of the year.  They are the broad questions that drive our study forward and that we seek to better be able to answer by the end of the year.  Some of these questions are profound questions about life, the student's direction and goals, and society's impact on our lives.  I find many young students enjoy and value contemplating questions of this magnitude.  I ask them to encourage them to think deeply about our world and their place in it.  

​Asking Questions Based on the Elements and Standards of Reasoning

The study questions below are all focused on one aspect of critical thinking, modeling for students how employing these key critical thinking concepts helps to build our understanding of a topic.  

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A Rubric for Study Questions

This rubric illustrates how I identify the goals for providing excellent answers to study questions.  Learning how to answer short study questions is one of the ways that I begin to teach students about critical thinking, reading, writing, and the art of explanation.  
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​Answering Questions to Develop Reading, Writing, and Thinking:

The Forest People Study Questions

I develop student reading, writing, and critical thinking skills through challenging short answer questions that require them to read with great care to find all key points in the reading, pick up implied meanings, explain their thinking clearly, precisely, and thoroughly, and to make connections to other topics of study.  These assignments are require students to work in a new way; the questions cannot be treated lightly or done effectively without considerable care, effort, and reflection.  I grade their work rigorously and set a very high bar to push their skills.  These study question assignments work as an introduction to the goals I have for student work and the type of challenges I put before them early in the school year.  

Formulating Questions to Direct a Study:  Brainstorming Questions and

​Building a "House of Questions" on Societies and Their Development in History

To begin our investigation of societies, students were asked to brainstorm questions about societies that would help them to gain a better understand of societies and their development through history.  Our purpose was to practice generating question and to underscore how it is your purposes and questions that guide a study.  Below is a long list of questions generated by an 8th grader.  

After generating the questions, students were asked to build a house of questions.  This is a method I developed based on the house of thought visual image we use to work with the elements of reason that focuses in on the element of questions.  When you undertake any thinking, you begin with a purpose to accomplish.  After identifying your purpose, the next logical step for moving forward is to generate the overarching question that flows from that purpose as well as the sub-questions that need to be answered to be able to answer the overarching question.  The project below was my first experiment with blocking that overarching question and its sub-questions out into a logical structure, where one question below helped to answer higher level questions until finally the overarching question could be answered.  Below you will first find the template I gave the students to play around with to build up their house of questions. My eighth grade students did a great job with this experiment and we ironed out together how to go about accomplishing the task I set out.  The final student product shared below is a bit hard to read because of its sheer size and complexity, but it illustrates well the critical thinking concept with which we were playing.  I also am including this project here to show you how I love to invent new methods as a teacher and find engaging and fun ways for students to explore significant questions.  I will continue to work on refining this project and finding a better visual tool to build it with than a spreadsheet program.  I hope you enjoy the spirit of exploration with which we undertook the project.  

​Below is the template I gave my 8th graders to work with to build a house of questions.

​Here is the final draft of a house of questions a student built.