The purpose of this module is to help you promote a spirit of inquiry in your classroom. Asking and answering questions is the best way to help children to explore and develop their thinking skills. In the module you will do many activities in which you will explore different ways of teaching to achieve this purpose.

Why do we need to explore thinking and questioning skills? If we want our learners’ education to be useful to them for the rest of their lives, we cannot simply give them a lot of facts that have no relevance in everyday life and not help them. If educators pass on information to students simply so that they can memorise it, only to forget it as soon as they have written the exams, then education is a waste of everyone’s time! 

If you can use questions effectively you can help children to learn to think. By learning how to pose questions themselves, and by practising thinking skills, your learners are developing life-long learning skills whereby they can produce their own information.

This module will help you to encourage your learners to ask questions, to inquire, to be curious. Once learners start asking questions and using critical thinking skills they will be better able to use the information on the WWW more meaningfully. Thereafter, they are well on the way to becoming life-long learners and researchers. 

Questioning and thinking are essential skills that learners must acquire before they can engage in any type of research no matter how elementary. Your learners must be reminded that the answers are not "out there" waiting to be discovered on some website. They must realize that they are the ones who are responsible for actively developing the right questions and constructing the meaning from the information they find.

After successfully completing this module, you will be better able to:         

• Demonstrate the use of thinking and questioning strategies in your classroom
• Recognise and use appropriate question types
• Formulate questions that stimulate interaction with information online
• Stimulate and empower learners to ask questions and solve problems
• Reflect on ways in which questioning can stimulate a spirit of inquiry in a networked world.

"Education is what is left when you have forgotten everything you have learned."

B.F.Skinner