Educational Pedagogy

‘Students Will Ask Great Questions If We Give Them the Chance’ is my latest Education Week column. Four educators share ideas for encouraging students to develop questions, including through projec…

High school students ask this question partly to challenge the teacher’s authority, but they may really want to know the answer.

Debrief questions are the most important ones to ask after a lesson. Here are 25 self-reflection questions to get students think about their learning.

Are there questions students can ask themselves while you’re teaching? Questions that can guide and support their own thinking and awareness before, during, and after your teaching?

Of course, this assumes you’re ‘teaching’ a traditional ‘lesson’ with a learning objective or target. If not, this may not be very helpful. This is also a list that, like many I’ve done, could get unnecessarily long fast. In some ways, this functions something like a KWL chart. The idea here, however, is less about brainstorming before or after a lesson, but rather having questions useful to guide the student so they can know what to expect.

A few tips to get started:

When I ask teachers what their biggest struggles are, one issue comes up on a regular basis: student motivation. You are able to reach many of your students, but others are unreachable. No matter what you try, they have no interest in learning, no interest in doing quality work, and you are out of ideas.

For a long time, I had no solutions; the problem was too complex. I have had my own unmotivated students, and I never had any magic bullets for them. Still, the issue kept coming up from my readers.

So I decided to do some research, to try to find what the most current studies say about what motivates students. This is what I found:

So I asked our writers to share some of their favorite conversation starters with their kids. These are especially great after a long school day when your babies don’t want to chat.