Continuing our conversation concerning Robert Marzano’s strategies that will help students acquire and integrate learning, think about the questions you are asking or the students are asking. When asking students questions:

1. Ask questions that elicit inferences
2. Ask analytic questions

Resources that focus on the concept of asking higher-level questions include:

• Bloom’s Taxonomy Model Questions and Key Words
• Bloom’s Taxonomy Revision

Barbara Waters, a science teacher whose curriculum is featured on The Annenberg Channel, suggests that, “Asking a question is harder than giving an answer. Never answer an unasked question. I think that over half a lesson should be developed from questions that the children ask — if they didn’t ask the question, they really won’t care about the answer.”

A friend once asked Isidor I. Rabi, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, how he became a scientist. Rabi replied that every day after school his mother would talk to him about his school day. She wasn’t so much interested in what he had learned that day, but she always inquired, “Did you ask a good question today?” “Asking good questions,” Rabi said, “made me become a scientist.”

Have you asked a good question today?