"What if you could design questions that engage students at this level in your classroom? What if you could do so without the burden of having to make the subject matter relevant or relatable to every single student?
The secret to writing good questions or problems may surprise you. The key, according to Willingham, is to pose questions or problems that can be solved. That means questions or problems that are not too hard and not too easy, but just right. Think Goldilocks."
Via Beth Dichter
How do you teach students to write good questions (or how to ask good questions)? This post suggests that good questions have to be at the right level of difficulty and provides three tips that will help you and your students learn how to write good questions (and I suspect how to ask them as well).
What are the three tips?
1. Shore up the students' prior knowledge
2. Lighten students' cognitive load
3. Un-situate students' learning
Each of these tips is described in more detail int he post and some additional links are also provided.
Teaching students how to question, either in writing or verbally, is a critical skill and this post provides some great ideas on ways to help students with the cognitive load so they are supported in the process. You might also want to check out the post Socrative Smackdown which has students learn discussion strategies, some of which are helpful with questions (and that is geared to students in grades 6 - 12).
how to respond to great questions