Question Tokens for Quality Questions

Questioning in the classroom is a hot-bed for developing thinking and drawing out deeper responses from our pupils. With that in mind, quality questioning should be promoted. A quick way of getting pupils to think about the quality of their questions that I’ve found useful is question tokens.

Pupils are given 3 question tokens (you can use more or less as the lesson or purpose dictates). When they want to ask a question, they must exchange one token for an answer. When they question i prompt, ‘are you sure that is the question you want to ask?’, ‘is that exactly what you want to know?’ or ‘how might you structure that question in a more specific way?’
The prompts enable pupils to really think about the quality of questions they are asking, ensuring that the questions really facilitate their learning and are useful to them.

It also serves the valuable purpose of calming the influx of questions with new classes; the kind of questions that pupils really could be answering themselves: Do I need to underline my title? Should I use blue or black pen? What’s the date Miss?

This is an oldie but a goodie, which I find useful with new classes and ‘old hands’ alike!
Simple but very useful!