By kallerna (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 orGFDL], via Wikimedia Commons If you teach in an inquiry- or project-based classroom, you probably use guiding questions to help your students really dig into a topic. Well, now that summer is officially upon us, it's time to consider what questions will guide your summer and help you really dig in. Here's a list of 100 guiding questions that can help you get the most out of this season. Pick a question from the list, or let the ideas here inspire you to fashion your own.

My friend Oliver Schinkten knows 150 awesome human beings. They’re students in his Communities and leadership classrooms at Oshkosh North High School, and they routinely do amazing things. Last year, each student in Communities found and interviewed a local veteran of World War II, the Vietnam War, or the Korean War. They prepared questions, conducted and recorded hour-long interviews, edited them into stories, and created keepsake DVDs for the veterans and their families. The students then planned and ran an event celebrating the service of these people and presenting them with the DVDs.

The Common Core State Standards require students to think more deeply in all classes. But what counts for deeper thinking? Bloom’s revised taxonomy lists thinking skills in order from superficial to deep: For many years, we’ve done well teaching and testing the top half of the taxonomy. After all, multiple-choice, true-false, and fill-in-the-blank items do an excellent job of measuring what students remember, understand, and can apply. On the other hand, they don’t easily measure what students can analyze, evaluate, or synthesize.

Communication is complex. Students need to be able to write to different audiences. They need to create an appropriate voice for each topic and purpose. They need to understand how to get their point across in a larger context. All of this complexity can be bewildering.

Calvin's twisted take on traditional snowpeople shows his creative thinking.(Image courtesy of Vegas Bleeds Neon via Wikimedia Commons.) When I write the first draft of a novel, I'm Calvin from the classic comic series Calvin and Hobbes. Brimming with imagination and life, I don't care what may be sensible, realistic, and conventional. I'm full of passion, flying in many different directions. Sure, there'll be plenty of mistakes, but at least they'll be big. When I revise and edit a novel, I'm Calvin's parents.

Business leaders are calling for workers who can solve problems and innovate solutions, but how can educators teach such abstract skills? After all, isn't every problem unique? Doesn't every solution differ? Yes. But the fundamental tools of problems solving are common to all situations, and they can be taught. The two most important mental tools are critical thinking and creative thinking. Critical thinking is convergent. It focuses intently on a topic, paying careful attention to logic and rules.

Ollyy, 2014 / Shutterstock.com Social-Emotional Intelligence refers to your ability to understand and manage your own emotions and recognize the emotions of others. A few free, quick online quizzes can give you a beginning insight into your Social-Emotional Intelligence. The first two quizzes listed below connect to university research projects, and both measure your ability to recognize emotions and facial expressions.

VLADGRIN, 2014 / Shutterstock.com Social-Emotional Intelligence allows us to negotiate our own and others’ emotions and feelings. No wonder it is vital to success in relationships, academics, jobs, sports, and other life activities. Employers, for example, have discovered that 67 percent of the skills they are looking for in new employees are directly related to Social-Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence).

We can't accomplish much in a second. Blink. Breathe. Take a step forward. We can do 60 times as much in a minute, and 3,600 times as much in an hour. Our truly great accomplishments come from combining the little things we do in seconds into long, complex processes that take days or weeks or months. Learning is one such process. None of us is born walking, but one of us became Usain Bolt. None of us is born writing, but one of us became J.K. Rowling. They learned how to do what they do through a long, involved process.

All teachers teach basic literacy: students learn any subject by reading, writing, speaking, and listening. These days, we also need to teach more advanced literacies, such as knowing how to use technology and manage information. But how can we teach all of those literacies? Is there a simple approach that makes sense of literacy in science, history, art, literature, computers, math, drama, and media? The Communication Situation Yes. The communication situation is the key to unlocking any form of communication in any subject.