Questions! Questions! Questions! When a teacher is teaching students of any age, on any topic, questions are the teacher's best friend. As a teacher, do you ask questions of your students? When do you ask questions? Are they oral questions or written questions? For what purposes do you ask questions? Do you write out in advance the questions you ask? What kinds of questions do you tend to ask? What kinds of answers do you tend to get? What do you predict would happen in your classroom if you changed the kinds of questions that you ask? How could you collect data on and analyze your questioning patterns and the impact of different kinds of questions on your students' learning? What criteria could you use to assess the effectiveness of your questions?There are many questions to be asked about the pedagogical practice of questioning. Questions provide insight into what students at any age or grade level already know about a topic, which provides a beginning point for teaching. Questions reveal misconceptions and misunderstandings that must be addressed for teachers to move student thinking forward. In a classroom discussion or debate, questions can influence behaviors, attitudes, and appreciations. They can be used to curb talkative students or draw reserved students into the discussion, to move ideas from the abstract to the concrete, to acknowledge good points made previously, or to elicit a summary or provide closure. Questions challenge students' thinking, which leads them to insights and discoveries of their own. Most important, questions are a key tool in assessing student learning. When practiced artfully, questioning can play a central role in the development of students' intellectual abilities; questions can guide thinking as well as test for it.Although many teachers carefully plan test questions used as final assessments of students' degree of experience with the course material, much less time is invested in oral questions that are interwoven in our teaching. Analysis of the kinds of questions we ask, whether they are oral or written, and the nature of the answers they elicit is even rarer. Given the important role of questions in teaching and learning, a method for collecting evidence about our own questioning strategies