Sometimes Questions are More Important Than Answers

Each year,  I spend some time setting goals.  One of my goals this year is learning how to ask better questions.  Asking great questions leads to much more thinking than almost anything else.  The September 2015 Educational Leadership journal has devoted the entire issue to Questioning for Learning.  Much of the work mentioned in this post comes from articles by Marge Scherer and Grant Wiggins.

Leonard Mlodinow is a famous physicist.  In his book The Upright Thinkers he recounts a conversation he had with his father who was a Holocaust survivor. While in the Buchenwald concentration camp, a fellow innate showed him a math puzzle.  Intrigued, his father, who had only a 7th grade education himself, tried to solve the puzzle, but could not.  When he asked for the explanation, the mathematician offered a deal ---the solution for a crust of bread.  "my father's need to know was so powerful, he parted with his bread in exchange for the answer," Mlodinow writes (p.3).

Humans have the unique propensity to think and question.  How can educators learn how to encourage students to ask their own questions, and explore answers?  Innovators ask questions.  According to Warren Berger in his book A More Beautiful Question, the question, "What if we put wheels on it?" led to the rolling suitcase.  "What if Morse code could be adapted graphically?" led to the creation of the bar code.  "Why did my candy bar melt?" led to the invention of the microwave oven.  Here are some tips to help ask better questions.

1. Ask questions that may be answered many ways. Good questions are divergent.  They are sometimes unanswerable or have multiple possibilities.

2. Ask questions that invite argument and debate. Arguments involve unsettled issues of understanding or application.

3. Will the  pursuit in answer of the question lead to a Big Idea? A good question will take you to the core issues and insights of a topic. A good question has to be more than just intriguing.

4. Ask questions that can be used across disciplines. For example, after reading Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad series, a question may be asked: How do Frog and Toad act like friends?  A better version of this question would be this---Who is a true friend?  This version connects to varied texts and to personal experience.

5. Does the question get at what's odd, counterintuitive, or easily misunderstood?  A common question teachers ask is What the difference between fiction and nonfiction?  A better version of this would be ----When is fiction revealing, and when is it a lie?

6. Am I trying too hard to craft the perfect question?  Asking a good question takes practice.  Use brainstorming techniques and draft webs of related questions.

7. Am I looking for questions in all the wrong places?  To aim for understanding is to aim for three kinds of learning:  acquisition, meaning making, and transfer.  What problems will prompt learners to inquiry?  So instead of asking students to compare and contrast mean, median, and mode ask,  "What's the fairest ways to calculate grades?"

High level questions yield a high level of student inquiry.  As Claude Levi-Strauss once said, "The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.