Welcome to the Questioning Knowledge Base

Questioning dominates the classroom.

It is one of the main ways we communicate with learners.

Every day, teachers ask hundreds of questions, using them to check knowledge, drive learning, stimulate thinking and provoke discussion.

Questions make demands.

They ask the learner to do something.

Looking critically at our questioning therefore means looking critically at what we are asking learners to do in our lessons.

How we are asking them to think.

Here, I have dozens of questioning strategies, techniques and activities for you.

All of which can help you develop the quality of your questioning, change the dynamic in your classroom, or simply give you a new method to add to your repertoire.

Most of the blogs are short, sharp and to the point.

Practical ideas you can quickly adapt and apply.

If you want to go deeper and develop your thinking further, you’ll find blogs and articles clustered together in groups.

Reading a group is like reading a chapter of a book, giving you scope to dig deep into a particular topic.

In addition, there are hundreds of ready-made questions, covering Bloom’s Taxonomy, plenaries and stingrays (questions that pack a jolt and get learners to think creatively).

You can use these as they are, zero-planning required, or adapt them to suit your learners.

And, just for confirmation, these questions are all a result of me sitting down and thinking them out. No AI involved.

(P.S. You can also download my freshly edited and redesigned FREE resources The What If? Box, The Ethicist, The Philosophiser, and The Political Philosophiser. Each of which has 168 ready-made questions you can use to get your learners thinking in different ways. They’ve already been viewed and downloaded over 98,000 times by teachers across the world, and you can secure your copies today.)

Navigate the Questioning Knowledge Base

How do questions work, and why do we use them?

Questioning Activities

Subject-Specific Stingray Questions