Q Tasks: How to Empower Students to Ask Questions and Care About Answers

Understanding is a process, and the most critical key to improving understanding is through asking questions. This timely book shows teachers how to develop a questioning culture among students.

Offering students essential survival skills for the complexities of the information age, Q Tasks presents practical strategies that will empower them to become critical thinkers and users of information. This step-by-step book outlines more than 80 tried-and-proven classroom activities that will take students beyond memorization and rote learning. Teachers will find innovative ways to help students ask real questions that focus on personal understanding and give them ownership of their learning experience. It focuses on tasks such as:

• evaluating the reliability of information;
• connecting with literature and the arts;
• analyzing personal issues and setting realistic goals;
• exploring scientific and mathematical concepts;
• delving deeper into world issues;
• testing new ideas.

Each “task” is clearly delineated and contains explicit teaching instructions, curriculum contexts and evaluation techniques. The flexible tasks are designed to nurture curiosity and cultivate wonder and imagination. They aim to create a community of learners that deal with rich information and offer opportunities for sharing the learning with others.

More and more, the demands of our world involve the critical and creative use of information. By encouraging students to ask their own questions, teachers help students develop the tools they need to cope better not just in school, but outside the classroom and into their adult lives.

Sandi can't remember why she became a teacher, but she thinks it was "just what I was born to do. I love the excitement of realizing a student actually 'got it' and learned a new skill that will make a difference for him in life as well as in school."

Sandi is a graduate of the North Bay Teacher's College, York University. She's been a K through 8 classroom teacher, teacher librarian, and library consultant in the Toronto School District. She currently holds staff development sessions in Victoria, Vancouver, British Columbia, and across the United States.

Her approach to professional development is "to develop strategies and processes that will endure success and help students 'do life' as well as school."

Sandi sums up her approach to writing a book in four easy steps: "Bright ideas, chaos, focus, aha!"

She lives on Chandos Lake in Ontario's Kawarthas and has two grandchildren.