Ask, Don't Tell: Powerful Questioning in the Classroom

Artful questioning may be the most powerful tool a teacher has in her instructional toolkit to manage the class, engage students with the subject matter, encourage dialogue, and deepen understanding. Educators are encouraged to break the pattern of low-level daily procedural questioning and instead focus powerful questions that increase student engagement and insure their mastery of content and skills. Powerful questioning may engender deep, diverse, creative, and metacognitive thinking.

The authors, all with extensive teaching experience, describe powerful questioning in English Language Arts, Mathematics, History and Social Studies, and Science through both exposition and narration and using vignettes of teacher practice. Their focus is on those moments when teachers and students are engaged in classroom questioning tasks that involve face-to-face interactions and oral discourse, which comprise the great majority of time spent in schools.