"Teaching Students to Ask Better Questions"
Wednesday, September 28
Laura Greene, Associate Professor of English, Augustana College, Rock Island IL**
Asking good questions is at the heart of critical inquiry, yet we rarely focus on the kinds of questions that our students ask. According to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, "Too often students leave school never realizing that knowledge is answers to someone's prior questions, produced and refined in response to puzzles, inquiry, testing, argument, and revision."1 Laura Greene studies the way we teach students to ask questions. By analyzing the texts of actual student questions, she has tried to comprehend how students understand and frame their questions. She found that students usually use a fairly simple model of questioning, designed primarily to gather information or resolve confusion - a "closing down" process. She seeks to discover how faculty can help students instead to "open up" the questioning process, to ask questions that will lead to deeper inquiry.
**Laura Greene will be on campus from Tuesday evening to mid-afternoon Wednesday. She will be available for additional small group or individual meetings at dinner, breakfast, or through Wednesday morning. If you would like an opportunity to talk with her at any of those times, please email cila@stolaf.edu .
1 in Understanding by Design (Alexandria, VA: Assn for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2000)
