Presents an Introduction to

Highly Effective Questioning

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 Forward

Highly Effective Questioning (HEQ) is a method of instruction that uses

systematic questioning to improve student achievement.
Created by Dr. Iles Lee Hannel, HEQ is the result of years of observed
teacher best practices combined with insights gained from the field of
educational psychology.
Dr. Hannel recognized questioning as a very powerful tool for improving
school instruction. It is cost effective and, therefore, equally available to
all teachers.
HEQ is a practical method of instruction that helps teachers learn how to
ask the right questions in the right ways at the right time to maximize
student achievement.
Without further ado, let us now begin our overview of Highly Effective
Questioning!

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 What is a Critical Thinking Skill?

1. A critical thinking skill is a mental act. Critical

A A thinkers are active and not passive.
Mental Critical
2. A critical thinking skill is a critical or important
Act Act
mental act.
3. Critical thinking skills can be taught, and instruction
Amenable Generalizable that builds and reinforces critical thinking is
To Across imperative.
Instruction Content
4. Critical thinking skills are generalizable across
content areas.
An Example of a Critical Thinking Skill: Comparison
Comparison requires active participation on the part of the thinker. It is important for our understanding of
the world, and is a skill that can be taught. Moreover, it applies across content areas: we compare in
math, in history, in poetry, and even when buying a car.

How do Critical Thinking Skills Help?

Critical
We use concepts to link different pieces of content and to Thinking Skills
imbue that content with meaning. Our critical thinking skills
allow us to analyze content and situate it within a Concepts
Wars
conceptual landscape. Hence, school content takes on History

more meaning for students with better critical thinking Dates American Wars

skills. Content
1776 1865 1945

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The Triangle Of The Three Cs
 How to Ask Questions: Scope and Intentionality
Scope
The question should be phrased
in such a way as to allow for the
broadest set of possible answers.
Maintain broad scope in your
initial questions.
Narrow your scope as the
questioning continues.
Intentionality
The answers you intend to hear
back from students should have
the characteristics of being
(1) specific; (2) justified; and
(3) complete.
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Example: For the figure below, a good broadly-
scoped question would simply be:
What do you see here?
B C
Triangle Triangle
Triangle
ABC ABC
BCE
Triangle Triangle
ABE E CDE
A D
You should continue questioning until
students match your intentionality and can
label all 5 triangles.
Important: Dont ask a narrow question such as,
Can you show me the five triangles? Active
thought occurs in the gap between your broad
scope and narrow intentionality!!
 The Role Of The Mediator
Lets take a look at why questioning is so important for student development

Consider the Following 3 Learning Theories:

Stimulus Response

S R
Skinner Stimulus-Response. Skinner more or less thought that
learning was a direct result of the impact of environmental stimuli.

Organism (Child)
Stimulus Response Piaget Stimulus-Organism-Response. Piaget saw the

S R
developmental level and biological limitations of the organism
(child) as the major determining factor in learning. Biology plays a
large role in this theory.

Organism (Child)
Stimulus Response Feuerstein/Vygotsky/Constructivists Stimulus-Human Mediator-

S H H
R Organism-Response. Recognized that culture plays a very large
role in education. The human mediator interacts with the child to
make the stimulus comprehensible. Hence, dialogue is crucial for
optimal learning. Constant questioning allows constant mediation
Human Mediator Human Mediator and interaction. Dr. Lee Hannel studied with Feuerstein, and his
(Teacher) (Teacher) insights have been incorporated into Highly Effective Questioning.

The Bottom Line: The subjects taught in school are quite complicated. Students will learn
about them much more efficiently the more we interact with them. A lecture is a one-way or
unidirectional interaction. By promoting dialogue, questioning ensures that the student
also actively participates in the interaction. INDEX
Principle 1: Students come to school with the need to learn, and when they are in
school they do not have the right not to learn.
What does this mean?
Students need to come to school to gain skills vital for their own future economic independence,
which is in turn vital for the collective wellbeing of our nation.
This said, it remains clear that many of students fail to recognize their learning needs. They often
fail to see education as the crucial primary good that it is.
As teachers, it is our duty to ensure, to the best of our abilities, that these students acquire the
education that they need, regardless of whether or not they recognize the need for it.

This brings us to our practice: We must ask questions of each and every student. There
will necessarily be a large involuntary component to our questioning process.

Everyone!
Everyone!
Everyone!

Everyone!
Everyone!
Ask questions of the student who seems interested and of the student who seems
disinterested, of the high performers and the low performers, of those who like to talk and of
those who are shy. Because everyone must learn, we must ask questions of everyone!

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 Principle 2: Students are undertrained not underbrained;
they are dormant but not dead!
What does this mean?
Often, when frustrated with a students lack of performance, we look for reasons why the student simply
cant learn. We cite parenting, deficient early schooling, culture, lack of experience, or even biology as
limiting factors that cap a students academic potential.
As long as we believe in or fish for excuses for why we cant teach kids or why our students cant learn, we
fail to dedicate ourselves fully to the task at hand: to do as much as we can with what we have, to help each
student leave the school year at a higher level than the one at which he or she entered the year.
Fortunately, the vast majority of our underperforming students do not suffer from limitations that cannot be
overcome. They are not underbrained, but undertrained. The remedy, then, is in providing effective training
via the human mediator from the model we examined earlier.
This brings us to our practice : Initial student questions should be at the same degree of difficulty,
Organism
and all students should be asked the same number of (Child)
questions over time.
Stimulus Response

S H
Students brains need training to be strong!
H
R
Human Mediator Human Mediator
(Teacher) (Teacher)

Most students cant train themselves, but an

efficient human mediator with a plan can help
Decode
them along to a higher level!
Classify
Compare
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Label
 Principle 3: Question, question, question ask only questions!

Why so many questions?

The only time that you can ever have PROOF that a student is, a) thinking about what you want them to
think about, and b) thinking about it correctly is when you ask a question and get a response. Questioning
ensures student engagement!!
Often when students have problems answering, we do too much hinting, telling, explaining, modeling,
giving, etc. We wind up answering our own questions! We must refrain from such actions in order to
encourage student activity. Remember, critical thinking is a mental act! Merely listening is passive.
Shoot for 50 questions per hour as a minimum. Once you get up over 100, youre probably proficient at this
principle.

Lets focus on practice : Ask only questions during the lesson and refrain from explaining, telling,
hinting and other non-questioning strategies.

Question to encourage student thought!

When teachers are thinking most critically (i.e. lesson

planning), they constantly ask questions about how a
lesson fits together and how it should be presented. Lets
teach kids to think the same way by asking questions.

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 Principle 4: We must follow a question-response-question (Q-R-Q)
pattern in our questioning of students.
What is the purpose of the second question in a Q-R-Q pattern?
One of the most important uses of questioning is what we refer to as the learning moment. In a nutshell, a
teachers follow-up questions in response to a students response will help direct the student to better thinking
practices.
By asking students to justify answers, you can:
a) Be sure that students are thinking correctly
b) Allow students to provide good examples/modeling to each other via their explanations
c) Troubleshoot students thinking processes by having them expose systemic errors
Finally, a Q-R-Q questioning pattern teaches students not to give random thoughtless answers, because
they know that they will always be asked to justify any answer given.

Lets focus on practice : Have students justify all responses. For ALL responses, good, bad, and in-
between ask questions like, How did you get your answer? or Please justify your answer.

Q-R-Q guarantees that the dialogue goes two

ways, as it does in the S-H-O-R Model S H H
R
Scope
The question should be phrased in such a way as to allow for the
A Q-R-Q model allows you to continue asking questions in broadest set of possible answers.

reaction to student responses to direct them to your intentionality. Maintain broad scope in your
initial questions.

Narrow your scope as the

questioning continues.

Intentionality
INDEX The answers you intend to hear back from students should have
the characteristics of being (1) specific; (2) justified; (3) complete.
 Principle 5: We must not be negative when asking students questions.

Why not?
Negative feedback is a regulatory mechanism. When we do something and get negative feedback, it
means, Dont do that again!
If we are negative when we engage students in questioning, it shuts them down, discourages their activity,
and kills the dialogue. If they stop answering your questions, HEQ is dead in its tracks.
It is not always simple to honor this principle often frustration is a natural reaction. The point is that
negative expression is counterproductive and should be avoided when trying to get students to learn.

Lets focus on practice : Remain positive (or at least neutral) when questioning students.

Dont get ruffled

Lets keep it civil!

If students stop interacting, then we
cant teach them nearly as well!

And who wants to talk to this guy?

Smile and the world smiles with you.

Well, theyll keep answering your questions anyway

Even if you have to force the smile!

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Principle 6: We do not ask questions that promote random trial and error behavior.

Why not?
Most low achievers dont use systematic methods to make educated guesses and to learn from their
errors. Instead, they guess randomly
Guessing strategies are randomly right and mostly wrong.
Many behaviors learned during the school-aged years stick with people throughout their lives.
Critical thinkers use strategic reasoning to tackle problems. Encouraging random guessing is
counterproductive to the project of training good critical thinkers!

This brings us to our practice: Do not ask questions that encourage guess-making behaviors.

There is a large difference between practice that attempts to

reproduce a model and random trial and error.

Trial and error is NOT an efficient way to learn MOST things

taught in school. Remember that we as teachers are helping
students to construct knowledge and meaning!

We want thinkers, not gamblers, so avoid

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questions that encourage random guessing!
 Principle 7: We must act to discourage the use of I dont know as a way
for students to avoid classroom participation.
Why is this so important?
The I dont know response is a behavior learned early in life ever notice that even
kindergarteners know a whole litany of such responses?
Often, students give the I dont know response without even stopping to think about the problem
they are presented with. As often as not, it means, please go on to someone else because I do not
wish to participate at the moment.
This behavior depresses learning and, as such, is unacceptable. The key? It must be unlearned!

This brings us to our practice: If a student says I dont know, follow up immediately with one
to three additional questions.
Dont hint, and dont let them escape.

Ask 1 to 3 additional questions to get the student to come to know,

but DONT badger the student with an unending string of
questions!
Sometimes students will eventually find the answer, and sometimes
they wont, but they will learn that they are expected to try every time.

Some people fear that this suggestion is confrontational. Challenging students in

a nurturing environment is necessary to give them important skills. Total comfort
is not worth the cost of ignorance!
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 A Time to Reflect The Big Picture

The following slides layout The 7 Steps to Critical Thinking.

The 7 Steps details seven very important mental acts that we want to elicit from our students. Using The
7 Steps helps insure that teachers ask the right types of questions at the right moments to maximize
student understanding.

While The 7 Steps deals with the major cognitive concerns of HEQ, it is important to keep in
mind the previously discussed 7 principles for higher expectations. These principles and
associated practices are specific strategies that help to create a classroom culture of active
thought and participation necessary for HEQ to flourish.

When questioning according to The 7 Steps, always remain aware of scope and intentionality.
Remember, active thought occurs in the space between broad scope and narrow intentionality.

Scope
The question should be phrased in such a way as to allow for the
broadest set of possible answers.

Maintain broad scope in your

initial questions.

Narrow your scope as the

questioning continues.

Intentionality
The answers you intend to hear back from students should have
the characteristics of being (1) specific; (2) justified; (3) complete.

Frequently reflect on the big picture for success in learning the techniques of HEQ!
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 Step 1 LABEL, IDENTIFY, FIND

Poorly performing students often see less than half of what the classroom teacher may assume they
should naturally notice as basic, relevant information

The initial recognition of important information is absolutely crucial to the further development of student
understanding.

Such labeling is not natural with respect to complex content. Instead, it must be learned.

Ask questions to develop facts in order of relevancy, as far as is possible. Reinforce the rule of
Relevant Facts First! If the student answers with an irrelevant fact, use questions to redirect and
refocus.
Make sure the students pick out the facts. While you already know the important facts, pretend that you
see nothing until the students show you.

Sample Questions
What facts do you observe?
What can you tell me as you look at the page? Make the students do
Can you label the most relevant facts? the detective work.
What is the key information?
What do you see?
What makes that a relevant fact?

In case you were wondering: Yes, this step IS basic. Basic, Fundamental, Crucial, and Absolutely
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Necessary for effective learning!!!
 Sample Step 1 Application: Primary Reading

Gerbils are small pets that are easy THINK

to care for. They need very little INTENTIONALITY!
You want students to label/pick out the
space. Their food is easy to find in important facts/attributes/information
stores. The furry little animals are 1st easy
: ALWAYS
to care for
be aware of
what you
small petswant your students to
friendly and playful. see!food is easy to find
needs little space
friendly and playful

Ask Questions With Broad Scope!

EXAMPLES OF EFFECTIVE QUESTIONS EXAMPLES OF LESS EFFECTIVE QUESTIONS
What can you tell me about gerbils from what OK class, are gerbils small?
we just read?
2 : ALWAYS practice asking questions
nd
with
This question is toobroad
narrow inscope!
scope. It does all the work
This question is very broad in scope. for the students.
Remember that active thought occurs in the gap between your
What are some key facts from the paragraph? Has anyone ever seen a gerbil?
broad scope and narrow intentionality.
This question emphasizes relevancy. This question seeks information outside the selected
content. It might be a good question to stimulate interest
Did we learn anything else about them?
before starting the lesson.
This question seeks a more complete response or
Would it be easy for everyone to care for a gerbil?
enumeration.
This question asks students to predict or project, not
label. It is out of sequence.

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Remember: This step lays the foundation for the rest of the lesson.
If it is done properly, a lot of confusion can be avoided!
 Step 2 CONNECT, COMPARE, INFER, ANALOGIZE
Students often fail to see connections between pieces of information in a lesson.
The meaningfulness of any piece of information, however, depends on the web of connections
that one is able to make amongst its important components.

Note that we should also teach students to locate disconnections, or oddities in the material at this step.

This step asks students to make connections, form inferences, and draw comparisons among the
elements labeled in Step 1.
Once again, the skills involved in this step are not necessarily naturally acquired. For instance, many
students can read every word in a passage without having the slightest idea of its meaning.

As always, remember the 7 Principles and elicit answers from the students! It doesnt help much if the
teacher makes all the connections for the students.

Sample Questions
What is connected?
What is implied? Make the students begin
What should connect but does not? to show you how the
What is disconnected? labeled pieces fit together.
How are A and B like C and D?
What is the relationship?

The more connections students are able to make, the better their understanding, and
INDEX the better their problem solving skills will be!
 Sample Step 2 in Practice: Primary Reading

Gerbils are small pets that are easy THINK

to care for. They need very little INTENTIONALITY!
You want students to compare/connect/
space. Their food is easy to find in infer important relations from the text.
stores. The furry little animals are 1st need
: ALWAYS
little space be aware
because theyof
are small
whatEasyyou want
to care your students to
for because:
friendly and playful. see! food is easy to find
needs little space
friendly and playful

Ask Questions With Broad Scope!

EXAMPLES OF EFFECTIVE QUESTIONS EXAMPLES OF LESS EFFECTIVE QUESTIONS
Are any of these facts we listed connected? OK class, how much space do gerbils need?

2nd: inALWAYS
This question is very broad scope. practice asking questions with
This question doesbroad scope!
not require comparison or
connections The students should have found this answer
Remember
You said that theyre that
easy to care for. active
Why are thought occurs
at Step 1.in the gap between your
they easy to care for?
broad scope and narrow intentionality. What size gerbil cages have you seen?
This question encourages students to go back and
mine for connections to what is already labeled. This question distracts attention from the lesson at hand
because it seeks information outside the selected
You said that they only need a little space. What
content.
is one reason they only need a little space?
Do you understand that gerbils are easy to care for
This question encourages students to find
because their food is easy to find?
connections through inference.
This question requires no independent thought. It does
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 Step 3 CLASSIFY, INTEGRATE, PRE-SUMMARIZE
Students are sometimes aware of the important facts and a few connections, but still miss the overall
point.
Some students can successfully think at an individual-connection level but fail to develop a holistic
sense of given information.

Opportunities to have students integrate information are often overlooked until the end of a lesson.
Step 3 questions can occur at many points in the lesson to pre-summarize or integrate a relevant
selection of content (e.g., each paragraph in a passage, each section of a graph). Take advantage of
these opportunities as they arise!
Questions at this step help students with the all-important global questions such as main idea, authors
purpose, etc. They also help develop pattern recognition skills for math and science.

Make the students put it

Sample Questions all together!
What is the paragraph about overall?
Can you put the information that is given in order?
Is there an overall theme?
What is the trend?
How would you classify this information?
We started with the trees
Can you make a brief summary of what weve
learned so far? Now we look at the forest.

The more connections students are able to make, the better their understanding, and
INDEX the better their problem solving skills will be!
 Sample Step 3 in Practice: Primary Reading

Gerbils are small pets that are easy THINK

to care for. They need very little INTENTIONALITY!
space. Their food is easy to find in You want students to presummarize/integrate the
information and connections from Steps 1 & 2 to
stores. The furry little animals are form an1stunderstanding
: ALWAYSofbe howaware of
the paragraph/
sectionwhat
comes you wantasyour
together students to
a whole.
friendly and playful. the main idea of the paragraph is that gerbils are
see!
easy to care for.
each individual point or example in the paragraph
works toward expressing the main idea or theme.

Ask Questions With Broad Scope!

EXAMPLES OF EFFECTIVE QUESTIONS EXAMPLES OF LESS EFFECTIVE QUESTIONS
What is this paragraph about overall? How can we tell that the main idea is about how easy
This question requires students to focus on the gist of thegerbils are to care for?
passage. 2nd: ALWAYS practice asking questions
Scope is too with
narrowbroad scope!
for this step - it gives away the main
Remember
Can you summarize this paragraphthat activeor thought
in 15 words less? occurs
idea. in the gap between your
broad
This question encourages scope
concision and and narrow
relevancy. intentionality.
So, how much do you think it costs to care for a gerbil?
What do all the separate points share in common? This question asks students to predict or hypothesize far
This question asks the students to integrate related facts. beyond the content of the passage. It is out of sequence.

Teachers are in the habit of performing integration and summary for the students.
We must learn to require students to integrate information on their own.
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 Step 4 DECODE, INTERPRET
Students often make mistakes in answering or solving problems mostly because they fail to understand
questions.
Unfortunately, when students have problems understanding questions or directions,
teachers often rephrase instructions.
Such behaviors lead students to use the teacher as a crutch and discourage the
development of essential decoding skills. Refrain from decoding for the students!
Simply ask, What is the question asking you to do? or How do we go about following
these directions?
Dont skip Step 4 because you think a question is easy or obvious. You will often be surprised at
student responses. If it is easy, then theyll quickly give the proper answer and you can move on.

Dont be a crutch!
Sample Questions
What does the question ask?
How can we use the given information to solve
the problem?
Can you tell me more about the question itself?
What do you think the question is asking for?
Are there other ways of considering the question?
A strong thinker is an
independent thinker.
The Bottom Line: If students cant understand questions on their own, then they cant
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 Step 5 ENCODE, ANSWER
Good critical thinkers should be able to articulate the reasoning behind their answers.

If students cant explain their answers, then they dont fully understand them.

In particular, be sure to have students explain their reasoning behind multiple choice
answer selections.
Whatever you do, dont answer the question for your students. Remember that hinting, rephrasing, or
giving bit by bit often amount to teachers doing all the work for the students!
Remember, we want students to learn to JUSTIFY all answers. Regardless of whether an
answer is correct or incorrect, ask for the justification. Quick feedback for wrong answers
can often lead to trial and error behaviors instead of the deliberate thought we seek.

We want our students to weigh the

evidence before finding an answer.
Sample Questions
What is your answer, and why?
What did you come up with, and how?
Can you tell me what supports your answer?
What is the evidence for your selection?

You dont know she knows

until she can tell you!

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Every answer should be Specific, Justified, and Complete!
 Step 6 APPLY, PREDICT, HYPOTHESIZE
This step gives students important practice applying rules and information to different problems and
situations/contexts.
The ability to generalize and apply what is learned to new or different situations suggests mastery of the
concept or skill.
Questions at Step 6 can be simple concrete questions of reinforcement or more advanced and abstract.

Questions at this step need not be content restricted.

Note, however, that Step 6 questions come toward the end of the lesson. Such questions
should not be asked until we are sure that students have the foundational understanding of
the first few steps.
People often see these questions as Higher Order Thinking, but it should be clear by
now that we cant have good higher order thinking skills without good lower order
thinking skills! Questions at this step might include:
Sample Questions
How would you apply this? Alternate Circumstances
If we were to change A to B, then how would our
Advanced Problems
answer change?
What if A never happened? Predictions
How does the solution or answer to this problem
relate to another problem? Counterfactuals

What ifs

While answers may be abstract and divergent at this point, students should
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always be required to provide justification for why answers are plausible.
 Step 7 SUMMARIZE, CONCLUDE

The summarization of a lesson reinforces what was learned, suggests the value of the learning process,
and prepares the student for future learning.

Because of a combination of habit and time pressures, teachers sometimes inadvertently do the
summarization for students. We must avoid doing the work for the students!

On the whole, Step 7 can be seen as a review and integration of the first six steps.

At this stage, students should be able to demonstrate global understanding supported by important
details. The final summary should be more complete than the pre-summary of Step 3.

Sample Questions Its quite a climb to the top

What did we learn today?
Please take me through the major points of the
lesson. Decode
Can you summarize the lesson? Classify
What do you remember from the task or assignment? Compare
Can you go from the beginning to end of the Label
process?
How does this type of process/problem/event work But with proper guidance, most all can
overall? reach new heights!

If your students can teach the lesson back to you, it means that theyve
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processed it and understood it!
Note: Every slide in this presentation has a purple box labeled index in a corner at the bottom of the screen. Click any of
these buttons at any point during the presentation to access this index screen. From this index screen, click on any of the
indexed slides to the right to jump to that actual slide.

INDEX OF SLIDES
Title Slide
Forward
What is a Critical Thinking Skill
How to Ask Questions
The Role of the Mediator
Principle 1 No Right not to Learn
Principle 2 Undertrained, not Underbrained
Principle 3 Question, Question, Question
Principle 4 Q-R-Q
Principle 5 No Negative
Principle 6 Avoid Trial and Error
Principle 7 No I Dont Know
A Time to Reflect The Big Picture
Step 1 Label
Example Step 1
Step 2 Compare
Example Step 2
Step 3 Classify
Example Step 3
Step 4 Decode
Step 5 Encode
Step 6 Apply
Step 7 Summarize