About this strategy
Questioning moves students from passive reading to active inquiry. Rather than answering questions set by the teacher, students learn to generate their own questions about the text — from simple knowledge-based queries to complex analytical and evaluative questions. The questioning strategy uses frameworks like Bloom's taxonomy to help students understand the different levels of questioning and develop the skills to interrogate texts independently.
The four activities
Each activity includes detailed teacher instructions, student-facing instructions, a worked example, reflection prompts, and extension ideas in the book.
Four Questions
Students learn four levels of questioning aligned with Bloom's taxonomy: knowledge and comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesising and evaluating. Working in pairs or groups of three, they write one question from each level about a text, making explicit that questioning goes far beyond simple comprehension.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
Why? Why? Why?
Starting from a teacher-provided declarative statement about a text, students form a "Why…?" question, then swap with a partner to answer it. From each answer, a new "Why…?" question is derived, repeating three times. Students finish by writing a summary sentence incorporating all three layers.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
Text Interrogation
Students interrogate a text from multiple angles using a three-layer concentric circle framework: the broad context (what was happening in the world), the author's context (who wrote it, their biases), and the issues, values and ideas present in the text.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
Deep Questions
Completed at the end of a text study, students identify key moments and brainstorm five to ten questions at the analysis or synthesis level. Students share their best questions with the class, which are then categorised, discussed and refined. The richest questions can become actual assessment topics.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
Get the full activities
The book includes complete instructions, reproducible student handouts, real student examples, reflection questions, and extension ideas for all four activities.
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