Continuous exposure to inquiry questions teaches kids how to think in situations outside of school, to greet life with curiosity and healthy skepticism. It's possible that using the inquiry method may be one of the greatest contributions you can make to individual students and society. Why? Because real life is not a true/false or multiple-choice test. It's a series of critical judgments, from How fast can I drive on rain-slickened streets? to How will I choose between six candidates running for the same office? It's not what your kids read, but what they learn to read into a text and between the lines that makes them thinkers. Inquiry equips kids for life. Can you think of a better way to spend your time?

Wait Time in a Hurried World

By now it should be clear that inquiry teaching is an intensely cerebral activity for teachers and students. You'll need to be well-versed in the subject matter you're exploring with your students — but what great teacher isn't? Your kids need to think. But there's the rub. Thinking takes time. Suppose you ask: What do you think was the hardest thing about being a sailor on a voyage with Christopher Columbus? Suddenly there's a flurry of intracranial activity. Kids are digging, sorting, and evaluating. They're hitting the recall button, then applying the test of historic empathy: What would I hate the most about all those hardships? But that takes time. Different amounts of time for different kids, since even the smartest people process information at varying speeds.

Meanwhile, the room is as quiet as a tomb. Don't panic. And whatever you do, don't talk. This will be a real test of your strength, since most teachers suffer from horror vaccui. Typically, when teachers ask a question and get nothing in return but several dozen blank stares, they assume that something has gone terribly wrong, and switch to damage control. You know the drill. Talk louder, as if checking the acoustics. Rephrase the question to, "What made the Columbus voyages so difficult?" Now you have two slightly different questions in play, and your students must decide whether they should keep working on the first or shift to the second. Overanxious teachers may blurt out as many as four reiterations of the same question in a continuous string. Confusion abounds. To increase their odds of getting an answer, any answer, they restate the question in an either/or format with answers conveniently embedded within. "Was it the food or the uncertainty that made it so bad?" At this point, sharp students may pick up the scent. "Now we're getting somewhere. That's what she's fishing for." More silence. In a final act of desperation, teachers pounce on a spectacularly inattentive student, or simply answer the question in disgust and shift back to a more restful monologue.

What's going on here? It turns out that teachers, like kids, have been conditioned to the ping-pong approach to classroom dialogues. Researchers studying wait time discovered that when teachers ask a question, they get nervous if they don't hear an answer within three seconds. One. Two. Three. Three seconds? How much thinking can a kid do in three seconds? Or even five? Not much. Nonetheless, once the clock starts ticking, there's precious little time before teachers hijack the thinking process. They simply can't wait.

If you want inquiry to work, you must quell the urge to fill the void, because silence is your friend.

How do you develop your wait-muscle? Smoke. That's right. Lean against the chalkboard, assume the most nonchalant pose you can muster, and visualize smoking. Not the guilty little nips of people who swear they're trying to quit. I mean those long, pensive, lung-inflating drags that dyed-in-the-wool tobacco lovers take, after which they squint at a far-off point and exhale in slow motion, loving every moment. Smoke like that while you're waiting, and it will send a message to your students that you have all the time in the world. You're just going to hang out contentedly until they're ready to talk because your only interest is hearing what they think.

Smoking is so many light-years from Right-Answerland, your kids may go into shock. And that's the second benefit of smoking. While you're learning to relax, your kids are getting nervous. Silence is a great medium for thinking, but if it goes on too long, they'll begin to feel the pressure. No one's talking. Someone should be talking by now, and it's clear you're not going to crack. Eventually and with great hesitation, a hand goes up. Time to stub out your cigarette and play ball! Haltingly, the first brave soul takes a crack at the Columbus question — "the water got sour after a while and they couldn't drink sea water, so they were pretty thirsty." "Absolutely," you reply, and jot sour water on the board.

At this point all the other students relax because you got what you wanted. Except, what's this? You turn, fix them with a look of intense interest, and say, "What else?" A ripple goes through the group. There's another answer? They go back to thinking. And you may need to smoke a little more, until another hand comes up. "They got lost a lot because their maps were bad, so they didn't know if they'd ever get home." Repeat the process, lavishing recognition on this bold thinker, adding bad maps/lost to the list. Then ask, "What else?" At this point kids may conclude that you're completely indiscriminate. You accept every answer and dole out commendations. Courage spreads like measles. Eventually you'll convince your kids that you're truly interested in their ideas, not just prospecting for the "right" answer. Then hands will fly up and you'll be too busy to smoke.

Keeping the Brain in Motion

Once you've built up your wait-muscle and grown immune to the occasional bouts of silence, you'll be able to focus on the skills you'll need to master in order to orchestrate inquiry discussions. Think of yourself as a giant synapse in the class's brain. It's your job to connect and redirect all the ideas your kids are spewing out. Another image that works for this is air-traffic controller. In effect, you track the progress of the hunt for answers and send up a flare when kids hit paydirt. But what else?

As the orchestrator of this cerebral jamboree, you need to:

• Encourage your students to slow their thinking down and elaborate on their ideas.
• Stimulate further discussion with probing questions.
• Use the word wonder a lot, as in "I wonder what you mean by; I wonder what that means to you; I wonder how that relates to what we already know about; I wonder how you could test that idea; I wonder if that makes sense to other students."
• State aloud your own personal wonderings about the discussion, sending the clear message that students are expected to listen and think seriously about the whole conversation, not just sit and wait for their turn to speak.
• Translate your students' curiosity into probing questions.
• Model analytic strategies.
• Help students clarify errors in reasoning by formulating questions that they cannot answer except by correcting the faulty reasoning.
• Convey your utmost respect for your students as thinkers.

Planning Inquiry-Based Instruction

Inquiry is not bound to any one subject because it's not about content. It's a way to think about content. Open-ended questions tease kids to wonder, whether you're examining mummification or multiplication. Any part of your curriculum that requires thinking is ripe for inquiry. Any part that doesn't require thinking—well, I'll leave that up to you. Whether you're planning a single lesson or a six-month unit driven by open-ended questions, you'll want to start with some basic considerations.

• What's the big question about this topic?
• What other questions will guide the conversation to its goal?
• What levels of questions should be included — factual, inference, interpretation, transfer, valuing?
• How should questions be sequenced?

The Big Question

The big question captures the goal of your lesson or unit. It unifies all the work that will follow. To identify the big question, ask yourself, What's the point of this lesson? What do I want kids to learn? Then turn that into a question. For example, if I want kids to explore local history from the point when nonnative settlers first arrived, my big question might be: Why do you think people settled in our town in the late 1800s? Through the inquiry process, students should be able to answer the big question knowledgeably, listing or discussing all the factors that prompted people to take up residence in the area.

Once you're clear about your big question, post it, highlight it, publish it. Keep it in front of kids' eyes to unify their thinking and their work. Kids who are raised on big questions learn to evaluate every idea that's presented, every discussion point, every document to see if it helps them toward a big answer. They actively scrutinize information instead of being passive observers of the learning landscape.