Productive and Unproductive Questions

The most productive questions are ones that are designed to elicit a variety of responses. That is, questions for which a number of answers are equally valid. Try not to ask fact-oriented or yes/no questions as these will not generate much discussion.

Opening questions:

Start with a general, open ended question to warm people up. Examples:

• what did you think of today’s reading?
• Which reading did you like best, Why?
• Which one did you find hard or problematic? Why?
• How do you think this week’s readings relate to our topic? How do they relate to the focus episode? How do they relate to what we talked about last week?

Specific questions:

• You can organize this aspect by means of topic, reading by reading.
• Examples: Small detailed questions “What’s the argument for this conclusion?”; Large abstract questions “How does this compare with what so and so said?”; Interpretive questions “What does the author mean here?; Evaluative questions “Is the author right about this?”

Potential Activities

• Focus on a specific section of an article and ask students to respond to it.
• Choose specific themes from the episode related to our topic and have students relate examples in the episode to the readings.
• Use brainstorming such as “What does this material tell us about this topic?”, writing the answers down on the whiteboard.
• Divide questions among students and have them report back on their answers.
• Do a “1 minute paper”–give the class a question and one minute to respond to it. Then discuss the answers in pairs or groups.
• Choose a scene from the focus episode and have the students analyze how it reflects our topic.