Designing Excellent Questions

It’s no secret to experienced educators that students in grades 7-9 often struggle to get their essays and projects off the ground because they have difficulty formulating just the right question. This course helps students meet that challenge. Drawing on many of the ideas laid out in Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question: Using Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas, and a series of design thinking protocols, students in this course workshop their research questions in preparation for upcoming projects in their classes. They also work to develop more effective questioning techniques to drive their own learning on a day-to-day basis. After this course, your students will have the tools to identify, define, and evaluate the quality of their own questions, helping them avoid weeks of floundering in pursuit of vague research questions.

Who is this course for?

This on-demand course is designed for students in grades 7-9 and is available year-round to teachers at member schools who want to personally guide their students through an online learning experience on a flexible timeline that meets their needs. There is no GOA facilitator for these learning experiences; instead, GOA provides on-campus affiliated teachers with a Teacher Playbook and student and teacher access to a complimentary learning space in GOA’s learning instance. On-demand flex courses have five parts, student engagement averages 30-45 minutes per part or 3-4 hours of total course engagement.

The use of pathways in the course design will allow classes from a variety of disciplines to connect meaningfully to the program, including humanities, social studies, science, or advisory programs interested in related topics.