Teachers often dream of the lesson where pupils ask thoughtful, curious questions — the ones that make you pause for a moment and think, “That's interesting. Where did that come from?” But more often than not, pupils ask questions like “Is this right?” or “Do we need to write this down?” or the classic “Will this be on the test?”
These aren’t bad questions. They just aren’t learning questions. They are survival questions — pupils trying to navigate the school environment with the least cognitive risk.
For pupils to ask better questions, the classroom needs to change in subtle but profound ways. And so does our understanding of why questioning matters for learning.
Curiosity vs. Safety: Why Pupils Default to ‘Low-Risk’ Questions
Curiosity is natural in children, but school trains pupils to avoid the kinds of questions that expose misunderstanding. Asking “Why is that?” or “I don’t understand what happens between step two and step three” is honest — but risky. It admits confusion, and confusion feels socially expensive in adolescence.
A Year 9 pupil once confided to his tutor that asking a genuine question in science made him feel like he had “just announced to the room that he’s dumb.” The tutor asked why. The boy replied, “Because everyone else already gets it.” They didn’t — but the illusion of universal understanding is one of the strongest forces in schooling.
The first task of teaching pupils to ask better questions is normalising confusion. This connects to the ideas in The Science of Explanation: Why Pupils Don’t ‘Just Get It’ — confusion isn’t failure; it’s the precursor to understanding.
The Cognitive Value of a Good Question
Good questions do two powerful things:
-
They reveal how pupils are organising knowledge.
-
They expose misconceptions before they calcify.
Cognitive scientists often describe learning as the building of mental models — internal structures that represent how a concept works. Questions like “Why does that go first?” or “Why did the author make that decision?” are signals of model-building.
But pupils rarely ask those spontaneously. They need to be taught.
The Novice–Expert Problem (Again)
Experts ask deep questions because they have mental models already. Novices don’t know where the interesting questions live. This is the novice–expert divide.
A chemistry specialist may ask:
“What’s the mechanism behind the reaction?”
A pupil asks:
“Which bit do I write?”
Both are reasonable, given their location on the learning journey.
The job isn’t to force novices to ask expert questions — it’s to guide them up the ladder, making those questions more visible.
The Education Endowment Foundation makes a similar argument when discussing metacognitive strategies, noting that pupils need explicit modelling of how experts think before they can adopt those strategies themselves.
Teaching Curiosity Without Teaching Chaos
Some teachers fear encouraging questions because they imagine lessons devolving into chaos. But question-rich classrooms don’t require constant interruption. One English teacher solved the problem elegantly.
During Macbeth, she asked her class:
“What’s a question you have about Macbeth right now that isn’t factual?”
She gave 30 seconds’ silence. Pupils wrote their questions. No hands. No discussion yet. Once written, she asked them to swap their question with a partner and try to answer it, even if the answer was speculative.
Some questions were brilliant:
“Why does Shakespeare make Macbeth so likeable first?”
Others were analytical:
“Is Macbeth doomed from the start or does he choose it?”
And a few were gloriously teenage:
“Why is Lady Macbeth scarier than Macbeth?”
All three types improve learning because they move from what to why or how, which is the cognitive territory of understanding rather than recall.
Why Better Questions Improve Memory
Memory researchers often argue that what we think about is what we remember. Questioning forces thinking. Thinking reinforces encoding. It’s the same logic behind rehearsal, explored in How to Study When You Don’t Feel Like It where momentum matters more than initial motivation.
Pupils rarely remember what they copied. They remember what they puzzled over.
Helping Pupils Question the Right Thing
The interesting part is that questions direct attention. A Year 7 pupil once asked during a geography lesson, “Why do rivers curve like that?” The teacher abandoned the original question and spent 90 seconds on meanders, deposition and erosion. It was an interruption, yes, but also an authentic window into geographical thinking.
External platforms such as Exploratorium and the Right Question Institute have long argued that questioning is a learnable skill, not a magical trait possessed only by curious pupils. Their frameworks demonstrate that even reluctant pupils can ask good questions with structure.
Parents and Homework: The Questioning Trap
Parents helping with homework often fall into the efficiency trap. They answer questions instead of asking them. It’s understandable — homework is often done at 8pm when motivation is low and patience is thinner than anyone would like to admit.
But the parents who turn questions back — gently — are building something far more durable than correctness. They are building autonomy.
For example:
Pupil: “Is this right?”
Parent: “Tell me why you think it might be.”
It’s slower. But slower is often smarter.
Tutors and Questioning: The Underused Superpower
Tutors have a structural advantage here: they see individual cognition rather than group cognition. Good tutors make pupils explain their thinking aloud, then shape questions around that thinking.
This gives pupils two gifts schools rarely have time for:
-
personalised metacognition
-
safe confusion
As discussed in What Tutors & Mentors Can Do Right Now That Pays Off in June, the learning that lasts is often the learning that happens after the explanation, not during it.
Beyond Compliance: Asking Questions Builds Identity
The deepest reason questioning matters is rarely mentioned in classrooms: it moves pupils from passive recipients of knowledge to agents of inquiry.
A pupil who asks a question is not just learning a concept — they are practising intellectual identity. They are being someone who thinks, not just someone who works.
In adolescence, when school can feel transactional and high-stakes, this identity shift matters for confidence, motivation and long-term resilience. As noted in research on micro-progress and burnout, agency protects motivation far more effectively than rewards.
Final Thought
If we want pupils to ask better questions, we need to show them that curiosity isn’t a distraction — it’s the mechanism by which knowledge grows. And we need to make confusion socially acceptable, not academically shameful.
Better questions don’t just improve learning. They make learning feel like something worth doing.
