Several informal studies investigating what teaching methods lead to developments in critical thinking skills among elementary and secondary students suggest that students themselves may be the best means for teaching students. A researcher and a second-grade teacher, reflecting on three years of collaborative research, found that students are intuitive and inventive when it comes to writing their own questions for exploring the meaning of stories they have read for class. When the teacher relinquished control over the class by allowing students to determine the direction of discussion, she found that their thinking was in-depth and penetrating. Analyses of discussion videos and transcripts revealed a myriad of ways in which student-generated questions promoted critical thinking among the second-grade students. For example, students considered different ways of wording a question; they looked at how the presence or absence of a single word could affect its meaning. A second study initiated by an eighth-grade teacher interested in how the second graders formulated their own questions involved a collaboration between the second- and eighth-grade students. The eighth-grade teacher involved her students in devising and planning ways of studying the second graders' thinking. Their ideas resulted in a host of literacy activities. Further, the enthusiasm and interest the two groups took in each other developed reciprocal and mutually meaningful relationships. (Contains 18 references.) (TB)