Inquiry Tips: How do I Teach While Honoring Student Questions?

❓Generating questions.

🤔 Sparking curiosity.

💭 Planning for learning with student wonder in mind.

This list above is part of the “checklist” that teaching, leading and learning with an inquiry stance keeps tucked alongside their practice.

From rich provocations to playfully collecting evidence of learners thinking across a span of time, questions remain the foundation for planning for meaningful and connected learning.

Inquiry educators dutifully spend time with their scholars sorting questions generated during a thinking routine and actively move questions from Wonder Walls to Learning Walls as knowledge is co-constructed and collaboratively built.

But what happens if the students ask students that are not related to my curriculum?

From classroom teachers to instructional coaches and other programme coordinators, I get this question quite often so it was no surprise that when I was engaging in some consulting work with a grade one teacher this exact question rose to the surface when we were taking a closer look at the questions generated by his little learners.

As we looked closer at the student questions the teacher walked me through the ones they had answered together as a class, others they had indirectly addressed through curriculum and a handful of others that were just outside of what might be easily brought forward given the age of the students. With a conceptually planned provocation, the teacher was pleased to find that a majority of the questions connected to content. He smiled widely as he pointed out the questions that launched whole group conversations over the six weeks of the unit and others that were brought to the forefront of his lesson planning giving him a direction to curate a collection of classroom resources to model reading and research skills. As we continued to scan the pages of questions there were, of course, a handful of questions unable to be addressed by the curriculum.

These “outliers” gave us a pause. We could resort to well intentioned planning of finding just the “right” resources, identify experts that might be able to shed some light into topics that were outside of our range of expertise or even plan additional learning experiences for the students. But as we looked at the days left in the week and even doing a bit of reflecting of what research skills the class had already engaged in, I suggested that instead of planning for “answers” we consider planning a lesson towards another skill development this time around.

With this additional pause, I quickly learned that the students had engaged in lots of collective class research and knowing that the second term was well underway, I thought it might be time to stretch students’ research skills and scaffold towards a bit more independence. With just a few days before the students would be taking a midterm break, it was a perfect time to playfully approach student curiosity.

Building Student Research Skills

Research is an essential skill. And, it’s one, just like the writing process, can be a bit ambiguous and overwhelming. There are so many ways to begin, endless tools to choose from and, let’s face it, students are doing online searches on their own outside of the four walls of our classroom.

One of my favorite ways to mindfully scaffold towards more independent research is by introducing students to a Research Mat. I find that no matter the age of learners, this simple slide deck, with curated links, creates a space for students to flex skills and puts the “heavy lifting” in the students hands. Instead of responding to endless hands up waiting for my directions or countless questions that often go unanswered before the end of the learning block, this digital resource becomes the small, yet empowering, shift we make that’s a high engagement strategy while leveraging time towards competency and skill development.

Looking at the student questions (see example above) we quickly identified an interest in adaptations and heredity (although the students didn’t use this language in their questions, it was clear that they were quite curious about similarities and differences of external characteristics of living things). We then dug into video resources and scoured a favorite website, , to find a small handful of videos for students to be able to explore and in less than 30 minutes, had a lesson ready to go focused on note taking during the process of research.

After a brief modeling of the resource and an explicit connection to the questions that drove its creation, the students students were off to choose between the small handful of resources to explore and given a blank sheet of paper to use to catch all of their thinking. From neat bulleted lists, to strings of letters and even some illustrations with captions, we saw a wide range of ways that students chose to document their learning. As students clicked through this new tool, we maneuvered throughout the room seeing an initial hesitation from the students looking for affirmation and explicit next steps of what they were “supposed to do” next. Questions such as, “what do I do now?” or “what do I write?” gave us insight as to the ways that students were immediately feeling stretched with the task before them. Although not easy to answer with responses to settle the uneasiness, we instead chose prompts that supported while stretched and questions that leant themselves towards support while being open ended enough for learners to grapple and make meaning on their own.

By the end of the hour we had a new collection of data, some answered and unanswered questions and an experience that was rooted in an intentionality towards approaching learner questions with a different mindset than this learning community was used it. After the learners transitioned to lunch, the evidence before us showed us more confident learners (and a more confident teacher too!), an array of note taking skills that demonstrated student understanding and application of learning (and intentional modeling) that had taken place over the last term and some new evidence to bring to the next unit of inquiry. The grade one teacher noticed the bulleted lists that he has been using to co-construct anchor chats with one another, the nonfiction text features students emulated on their own without any prompts, the engagement from scholars that are typically resistant towards independent tasks, students lighting up with excitement while filling their page with facts and figures and an overall independence that students naturally differentiated to fit their needs in the moment. The application of skills that had been modeled after explicit instruction were showing themselves in the best of ways!

When we think of honoring students and their questions, it’s not the answering of all of their questions that shows them we value their curiosity. Instead, it’s the way in which we reconsider how we respond to them.

We honor students and their curiosity not by merely answering questions but by using them as a compass, taking a curious eye towards the general direction they reveal. We look up from “our plans” and evaluate the landscape, pausing briefly and playfully approach learner questions as a means to dig deeper into skills we know lay a foundation that help us navigate the uncharted territory of student curiosity while still staying “on track” with other systems and structures that might be out of our control. This journey and sharing reminds us of the potential of the detours and “outlier questions” as beautiful invitations towards new spaces of learning. My hope is that you reconsider your habits towards questions as means of an answer and instead view them as an invitation for more…

More opportunities to scaffold yet stretch.

More time to dig into what really matters.

More pauses to give space towards agency.

A big thank you to Natomas Unified School District for our continued partnership, classroom Learning Labs and leadership reflection and learning sessions. Partnerships (and educators) like these are so very special