Why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door? (Moody Blues)

My usual questions for students that I encounter in our learning centre often hover around the, "What are working on?" variety,

Not too clever, as it turns out. Recently a colleague suggested I should be asking, "What are you learning?" for a deeper dive.

One of the great secrets to fostering deep learning is the ability to help students raise new kinds of questions that they will find fascinating. - Ken Bain

Although better results have eventuated, I'm always on the look out for better follow up questions to get to some deeper understanding after the, "I'm learning about fractions" style response.

Here are some suggestions:

• How did your learning progress?
• What were the difficult aspects to this learning so far?
• What strategies did you use to get unstuck?
• How do you know that? 
• What evidence was used?   
• Why do you think that?
• What are the trends/key findings you've found so far?
• Why is that important?