Questions Worth Asking

"When we reshape our intention from teaching to thinking, our exchanges with children change. They become authentic conversations, and we ask our questions with the mutual aims of understanding a child's thinking and of supporting a child's search to make meaning — a search to know, rather than to learn," writes Ann Pelo in her article, "Finding the Questions Worth Asking," which serves as the basis for an Out of the Box Training Kit by the same name.

"Rather than using questions to lead a child to a particular revelation, or to direct a child's thinking towards content knowledge that we've determined has merit, we ought to ask questions that are useful for the child's course of exploration — which is to say, for the child's development as a thinker. This is what we mean when we talk about the co-construction of knowledge: thinking about thinking, in order to analyze and refine hypotheses."

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