Inquiring Minds Want to Learn
Posing Good Questions to Promote Student Inquiry
Hook students into learning with inquiry and questioning. Inquiring Minds Want to Learn guides students down four different inquiry pathways: Foundational, Understanding, Deep, and Expertise. This book delivers detailed guidance for how to phrase and pose good questions that facilitate inquiry-based learning.
Learn to phrase and pose good questions that support quality inquiry-based learning experiences
Quality questions, directed inquiry, and authentic literacy are important tools that enhance students’ comprehension, knowledge, and application of what is taught. Learn how to phrase and pose good questions that will ignite inquiring minds and enrich student learning during classroom instruction. Author Erik M. Francis shares a framework for engagement that hooks students’ interest and guides students down four pathways of inquiry and questioning that make learning stick.
This book will help K–12 teachers:
- Understand what it means to teach and learn with an inquiring mind
- Learn the elements of the Inquiring Minds Framework and why the framework is important
- Reflect on how they can engage in effective inquiry and questioning with end-of-chapter applications
- Rephrase academic standards into essential questions to better assess and advance student understanding
- Conceptualize how to apply the Inquiring Minds Framework through personal stories from the author
- Learn how to use Socratic questioning, prompts, and stimuli to promote inquiry and build cognitive rigor
- Explore the pros and cons of using artificial intelligence to create meaningful questions
Related Topics
Brain-Compatible LearningInstructionSocial-Emotional Learning and Wellness
Additional Information
“Inquiring Minds Want to Learn is a masterpiece that focuses on higher-level thinking and how students can develop curiosity, investigative skills, and creativity through inquiry and questioning. Francis even uses his own methodology in building topics around questions for all chapter titles and headers. I will certainly add this book to my must-have resources in this marvelous contribution to my never-ending goal of moving education from a prescriptive didactic pedagogy to one that focuses on inductive, investigative, and inquiry modes of learning.”
“In Inquiring Minds Want to Learn, Erik Francis supports educators by enhancing their ability to provide a profoundly deep learning experience that truly values the role of the student as intrinsic to the development of knowledge and deep thinking. It’s about time someone leaned into a conversation about the nexus between questioning and depth of knowledge in such an easily digestible and applicable way. These pages offer an invigorating approach to embracing student agency and authenticity through a commitment to the true meaning of inquiry.”
“In Inquiring Minds Want to Learn, Erik Francis explores the power of inquiry and questioning in education. This is an invaluable resource for educators looking to cultivate a culture of curiosity and critical thinking in their classrooms. It offers practical strategies and insights that empower teachers to unleash the power of inquiry-based learning. This is a must-read for anyone committed to fostering a lifelong love of learning in students.”
“Inquiring Minds Want to Learn will advance educators’ thinking about the power of inquiry in schools. Erik Francis’s Inquiring Minds Framework lays out a clear path for teachers to go from just asking questions to developing inquiry-based classrooms that not only build students’ knowledge and learning but also the skills they need to be successful in college, career, and the workplace. Readers will appreciate the numerous examples, question stems, and engagement ideas shared throughout. If schools thoughtfully commit to these ideas, this book can be a game changer.”
“In Inquiring Minds Want to Learn, author Erik Francis demonstrates stunning acumen for both inquiry learning and questioning techniques while creating a compendium of questions, stems, starters, and prompts for progressively deeper thinking. Erik gets to the heart of inquiry’s disposition, instructional design, and affective components for students, thoughtfully responding to the educator’s plea, 'Show me what it looks like.' He also opens the whole experience for teachers, as they reflect on practices and make improvements. What a transformative treasure to have in hand, and what a pedagogical bulwark against passivity, indifference, and just going through the motions: Here we have the tools and guided path for keeping critical thinking, intellectual agility, engagement, and efficacy our truth north.”