A question is a propulsive agent that can spark curiosity and fuel creativity, understanding, and imagination. As a part of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), students are expected to formulate and explore their own questions. Yet, it is rare that the skill of question formulation is deliberately taught to students. How can we transform teaching and learning and build the capacity for all students to acquire sophisticated higher order thinking skills through question-asking?
This session will introduce attendees to the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a deceptively simple step-by-step process which teaches students how to produce, improve, strategize around, and use their own questions. The QFT is an effective pedagogical strategy used by over 100,000 educators to teach the skill of question-asking to students across all grade levels and from all educational backgrounds.
Participants will experience the QFT themselves, see examples of how the QFT is used in science classrooms, explore how the QFT address the NGSS, and learn more about how the QFT benefits student learning. Participants will identify ways they can implement the QFT immediately to teach their students how to ask their own questions that will ignite their own STEM curiosity and investigation.