I think teaching students to ask their own questions can accomplish the goals of deepening comprehension and making new connections and discoveries on their own and teach a critical lifelong skill as well. When a student asks the question, he/she feels like it’s his/her job to get the answer, and he/she wants to figure it out.
In one of the British Council’s workshops, Dave Willis emphasized the importance of students’ being question masters in order to get them talking. As he also mentioned, teaching this skill in every classroom can help successful students to go deeper in their thinking and encourage struggling students to develop a new thirst for learning.
We can use it in many ways: to introduce students to a new unit, to assess students’ knowledge to see what they need to understand better, and even to conclude a unit to see how students can set a fresh learning agenda for themselves with new knowledge.
I believe their questions will have much to teach us.
In what ways do you encourage students to ask their own questions?
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Hi there, I think that working on questions can help stıudents with critical thinking skills as well as reading sills. I often ask students to ask questions to the writer when they read a text. (e.g. why does s/he give this example? What does he mean when s/he says...). It all begings with a question afterall :)
My students like interviewing and being interviewed.