We spend countless hours on our lesson plans, our assessments, our classroom management strategies. We attend workshops on differentiation, on technology integration, on social-emotional learning. But there's one crucial teaching skill that almost never appears in teacher education programs, and it might be one of the most important things we do every day.
Writing good questions.
Think about how much of your teaching depends on the questions you ask. Discussion prompts that get students thinking critically rather than just reciting facts. Project guidelines that inspire genuine inquiry instead of paint-by-numbers compliance. Assessment questions that reveal understanding rather than memorization. The questions we pose shape how our students think, what they explore, and ultimately what they learn.
Yet most of us never received formal training in crafting these questions. We learned classroom management techniques, pedagogical theories, and content-area methods. We practiced lesson planning and learned about educational psychology. But sitting down to write an open-ended question that genuinely engages seventeen-year-olds in thoughtful discussion about a novel or a historical event or a mathematical concept was something we were just expected to figure out on our own.
The result is predictable. Many of us default to closed questions with single correct answers because they feel safer and easier to grade. We write prompts that are too broad and leave students floundering, or too narrow and constrain their thinking. We accidentally build in our own biases or assumptions. We struggle to find that sweet spot where a question is challenging enough to be interesting but accessible enough that students can actually engage with it.
This gap in our training has real consequences in our classrooms. When we pose weak questions, discussions fall flat. Students give one-word answers or sit in uncomfortable silence. Projects become exercises in meeting minimum requirements rather than opportunities for genuine learning. We know our students are capable of more, but we're not always sure how to draw it out of them.
The good news is that question-writing is a skill, and like any skill, it can be developed with practice and attention. Some of us get better at it through trial and error over years of teaching. We notice which prompts lead to engaged discussion and which ones die on arrival. We steal and adapt questions from colleagues whose classes seem more animated than ours. We gradually build an intuition for what works.
But imagine if this learning didn't have to be so haphazard. Imagine if teacher preparation programs included explicit instruction in crafting open-ended questions. If student teachers practiced writing discussion prompts and got feedback on them the way they do on lesson plans. If veteran teachers had opportunities for professional development focused specifically on this skill rather than always moving on to the next educational trend.
The art of asking good questions deserves more attention in how we train and support teachers. It's not a peripheral skill or a nice-to-have extra. It's central to everything we do in the classroom. Our questions shape the intellectual climate of our classrooms and influence whether students see learning as an exercise in compliance or an invitation to think.
Until teacher education catches up, we need to take this learning into our own hands. Pay attention to the questions that work and the ones that don't. Share prompts with your colleagues and discuss why certain phrasings are more effective than others. Be willing to revise your questions mid-lesson when you see they're not landing. And most importantly, recognize that struggling with this is not a personal failing but a gap in how we were all trained.
The questions we ask matter. It's time we gave them the attention they deserve.
