Student-Generated Questions

Strategy Overview

How This Strategy Supports Language Development

Teaching students to ask their own questions is an essential skill for developing reading comprehension and for life. Asking questions cultivates curiosity and develops confidence and a sense of agency. When multilingual learners know how to ask good questions, they can receive comprehensible input that develops their language skills and their content knowledge.

In addition to writing questions, students can sort, prioritize, and explore their questions in order to engage with more deeply with their learning.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Model how to generate questions about a picture, experiment, artifact, or other content-related prompt.

2. Ask students to generate questions about the unit or text before, during, or after presenting some information or reading the text. 

3. Have students generate questions in small groups of 2-3 students. Have them write their questions on sticky notes, so they can work with them in the next steps. The goal should be to generate as many questions as possible in a short amount of time (5-7 minutes), not to answer or discuss the questions they generate. The questions may be open or closed, and answered in the text or not. This part of the routine is for students to think divergently and generate curiosity about the topic.

4. In teams, students can now work with their questions in many different ways:

• Sort questions into the category
• Sort questions into categories such as:
  • open and closed
  • factual, interpretive, and evaluative 
  • right there and think about
• Change a closed question into an open question or change an open question into a closed question
• Prioritize questions they would most like to answer

5. Share the questions from different categories or post their priority questions.

6. As students read the text or continue with the unit, they can look for answers to their questions or generate more questions based on what they have read or learned. These questions can also be used for independent research projects.

7. Teachers can also answer some of the questions during the lesson.

Lessons Learned

• Students may have difficulty generating questions at first since they are generally not required to ask their own questions. However, once they get comfortable generating questions and realize it is a valued skill, they become engaged and enthusiastic about the process.
• Practice asking questions as a whole class before asking students to work in small groups. 
• Give students some guidelines about asking questions in their teams. The Right Question Institute suggests the following rules:
  • Do not judge any question.
  • Do not stop to answer or discuss any question.
  • Write the question as it was asked.
  • Change statements to questions.

For more ideas, see the See-Think-Wonder strategy.

Differentiation

Entering/Emerging: 

• Purposefully partner emerging students with another bilingual student who speaks the same home language.
• Encourage the emerging-level student to ask questions in the heritage language while the other student translates and transcribes the question into English.
• Post translations of all question words (who, what, when, where, why, how, etc.) in all languages in the classroom. You can ask students to help with posting translations. For younger grades, provide an audio recording of the question words in English and home language. 

Developing:

• Provide sentence frames or a question formation grid to support students with forming questions.
• Model asking questions and write example questions on the board.

Examples

Content	Question Focus	Sample Student Questions
Language Arts: Elementary		Why is the little girl looking out the window? How does she feel? Image: Outside, Inside by LeUyen Pham
Art: Middle School		What kind of building is this? Why did the designer build it this way? Image: Hundertwasser house, Vienna
Science: High School		What is an invasive species? What are examples of invasive species? How do invasive species arrive in new places? How do invasive species affect other native species in an ecosystem, as well as people's activities? Image: Blooming hyacinth, an invasive aquatic plant, in Florida

See more activities at RightQuestion.org