Put Creative Thinking At the Heart of Your Lessons
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🎯 168 creative questions to get you and your learners thinking differently.
🎯 Suitable for primary and secondary.
🎯 Pick out questions you like, or select at random using the specially designed contents page.
🎯 Stimulate creative thinking in your classroom and train your learners in how to think outside the box.
🎯 Develop inventive, imaginative discussions that take you and your learners down paths you were never expecting.
The What If? Box is one of my favourite resources.
I loved creating it, and I loved using it with my learners.
Everything flows from that question stem: What if …?
It encourages speculation, hypothesising, and imaginative thinking.
All things we want our learners to be able to do.
Some of my favourite experiences have been when learners took a question in a direction I would never have anticipated.
And that’s the beauty of using ‘What if …?’ questions.
The structure invites learners to step outside the box and see where it takes them.
Effortless Creative Discussions
I designed The What If? Box so it’s as easy as possible to use.
No planning.
No effort.
Maximum engagement.
You’ll find 168 ‘What if …?’ questions inside. Each is on a different slide/page.
The contents page contains 168 buttons, each linked to a different question.
All you have to do is display the contents page, then either you or one of your learners picks a button and … voila! You have a ‘What if …?’ question to discuss.
(And if that question doesn’t quite cut it for you, simply jump back to the contents page and go again.)
The resource is FREE to download and FREE to use.
It is published by Gershon Learning Limited under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons license.
That means you can download it, freely share it and redistribute it with attribution and a link to this site, but you cannot use it for commercial purposes or create any derivatives of it.
Download The What If? Box Today
Here’s the PDF version for you to download FREE:
What’s Inside?
Here’s a sneak peek of some of the questions waiting for you inside The What If? Box:
- 🪄 What if humans could fly?
- 🪄 What if you could turn invisible for a day?
- 🪄 What if there was someone exactly the same as you?
- 🪄 What if school didn’t exist?
- 🪄 What if society was less equal?
- 🪄 What if money was banned?
- 🪄 What if humans had not invented writing?
- 🪄 What if colours had no names?
- 🪄 What if everything was black and white?
- 🪄 What if aliens exist?
- 🪄 What if other people could read your mind?
- 🪄 What if there were no mountains?
- 🪄 What if robots demanded rights?
- 🪄 What if farming was banned?
- 🪄 What if Paris was the capital of England?
You’ll find 168 questions in total, focussing on all sorts of things, and provoking creative thinking that shoots off in lots of different directions.
I’ve designed the questions as starting points, so you and your learners can take your discussions wherever you want.
All the questions invite follow ups.
Sometimes these will come from you as you develop the debate with your learners.
But often they’ll come from the learners themselves.
In my experience, The What If? Box tends to get learners throwing out questions that take the discussion down unexpected paths.
Especially once they get used to how the resource works.
Using The What If? Box in Your Planning
The What If? Box is non-directive and curriculum agnostic.
You can use the questions any way you like.
Here are three ideas to get you started.
✅ At the beginning of a lesson, open up The What If? Box on the contents page and invite one of your learners to come to the front of the room and select a button.
This will reveal a question.
The learner then has a choice: stick or twist.
If they stick, the class discuss the question on the board. If they twist, they get to go back to the contents page and choose a different question.
But they and the class must then discuss that question, no matter what comes up.
✅ Use The What If? Box as an extension tool.
When one of your learners finishes the main activity, open up the resource and invite them to select a question – either at random, using the contents page, or by scrolling through.
The learner then gets to spend time thinking about their ‘What if?’ question, discussing it with a partner who has also finished the main task, or writing a response.
✅ Display the contents page on the board and select a question at random.
Explain to learners that this question is the starting stimulus for writing a story.
Discuss the question with your class and construct a shared mind-map capturing connections, ideas, possible characters and potential storylines.
From here, you can move learners into the planning phase and, beyond that, have them write their stories.
P.S. You can access all my resources in one place on the free resources hub page.
