Questioning skills are not easy to teach!!

Well Rockingrua have moved through the questioning map and we've done lots of work on 'what makes a good question'? This was not as straight forward as I may have initially thought and has taken more time than I first anticipated...but was it worth it? Absolutely!
We knew the layout of the question map so this was not new to the students and we've used it before so there was prior experience BUT did we really know what components create a good question? After feed-back from lead teacher of ICT, we were given resources to enhance our questioning skills. We began by identifying the Seven Servants: who what where etc. Great we all knew those! Then we looked (lots of displays needed here) at the 'criteria' of writing a good question. We practised and practised so our questions were relevent to the topic, contained more than one Seven Servant and contained Keywords. We discovered just how important the contextual language is and how we incorporate it in our questions as Keywords. O'kay so now we have the tools and we've practised the process....where to from here? We used the question map to practise our skills and each student shared their questions to the class. The class then fed-back ideas on improvements or agreed a good question had been written. This was such a useful (although time-consuming) task as it allowed me to observe and listen to the students and identify those that still needed guideance. One of the key points that the students fed-back to each other was to stop using 'they' and 'their' and to be specific throughout the entire question. As their teacher, I was so pleased to hear the learning they had taken on-board and to listen to these wonderful questions they had written. Once our 'practise' was over, we moved onto identifying our own personal Hero. Each student brainstormed possible Heroes to them and wrote statements to justify each person. This ensured they were not randomly selecting but actually thinking about the person and their characteristics. Once this was complete they then chose one person that they believe to be their Hero. Then they brainstormed this Hero and included Keywords (from our display of contextual language) to describe the character of their Hero. Next came our Question Map. The students worked through this with confidence and wrote a good selection of questions to use for interviewing their Hero.
One point to note: It was decided (by the students) that if you use more than one Seven Serpent then you have two pieces of information to gather to answer the question and this must make it better!
And one other: Throughout the teaching of questioning skills there were many times that I reflected upon a lesson and was satisfied that the majority of students had understood and demonstrated successfully their skills but then we'd revisit and I found myself re-teaching/reinforcing the same skills. I mention this because the skills are life-long and not as easy for students to grasp and transfer without the time being put in.

We are now in the process of interviewing our Heroes so I'll update soon to let you know how our Inquiry goes and the outcomes of our interviews..