Questions Only Strategy




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ELA Web Pages:

Use this Strategy:

Before Reading

During Reading

After Reading

Targeted Reading Skills:

· Formulate questions to be answered by reading informational or literary texts

· Recognize the effects of one’s own point of view in formulating interpretations of texts

· Identify multiple levels of meaning

What is it?

Typically, our goal is for students to identify key ideas and formulate interpretations based on the texts they read. However, one of the ways we can raise our students’ awareness of the complexity of the reading process and at the same time have them reflect on the reading is to have them generate questions only about the reading as a springboard for discussion and/or writing. Indeed, if one of our goals is to help students develop more insightful interpretations of text, then we need to teach them how to ask more insightful questions of the texts they are reading.

What does it look like?

To begin with, you may want to chose an area of focus for your students’ questions; the questions can target content, process, skills, and/or any chosen area. Most often the questions students want to pose will come right off the page at them; however, we may want to challenge and refine our students’ skills by having them use Bloom’s Taxonomy to formulate increasingly complex questions about the texts they read. It can become particularly powerful when we consider both the writer’s content, process and/or text structure. The model below is based on a poem; however, this strategy is effective for both fiction and nonfiction texts.

Click here for a printable version of this model

How could I use, adapt or differentiate it?

For homework, students can choose 3 or 4 of the questions to answer to illustrate their understanding of the reading.
Once students have generated questions in response to a text, consider having them work with a partner to categorize the kinds of questions they have posed (e.g., knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) using the collaborative questions graphic organizer and then work with their partner to answer the questions they have posed.
A great closure activity for a full-length text is to ask individual students to develop questions for homework (e.g., two content questions and two writer’s craft questions that remain “unanswered” for them). Collect them the next day for compilation. On the following day, distribute a list of all of the questions to the class and have small groups or the large group choose the questions that strike a chord with the group and answer them in small or large group discussions.
Or, from a compiled list, for homework, students can choose 3 or 4 of the questions to answer to illustrate their understanding of the reading and/or as a springboard for discussion the next day.
Students can choose a question that intrigues them and develop a writing prompt or a thesis statement that they defend by gathering evidence from the text to support it.