The Questioning strategy requires the teacher to purposefully plan and pose high-level questions during teaching and learning that cause students to clarify and expand their thinking.

When using Questioning, the teacher purposefully asks strategic questions to help students clarify their thinking and share their reasoning. Students make sense of learning by thinking about it, connecting it to prior learning, and clustering it into larger concepts. They think deeply and strategically, applying knowledge and skills in response to probing questions.

Questioning is not teacher centered, a list of close-ended, recall questions, or a checklist of test questions. Questioning is most effective when teachers pose questions that require thought, allow students to answer questions in a variety of ways, and when teachers build students’ ability to ask their own probing questions.