Week #6
This week I learn the arts of questioning. Questioning is important and can be embarrass, rather than inquire. They can leave a student feeling exposed and stupid, more willing to skip class than to be humiliated again (Bly 1986). While this account of classroom questioning is grim, it is also partial. We have seen skilled teachers raise questions that ignited discussion, offer a question that promised to simmer over several days, or pursue a line of questioning that led to understanding. Those teachers suggest a counter-portrait of classroom questioning, one that contains detailed clues about how the language of classroom dialogue can be used to establish and sustain not just a momentary discussion but a lasting climate of inquiry. There's many types of questioning such as inference, interpretation, reflective and so on.
Questioning is a social outcome-students need the face-to-face skill of raising questions with other people: clarity about what they don't understand and want to know; the willingness to ask; the bravery to ask again. It is as central in chasing down the meaning of a dance, the lessons of the Korean war, or the uses and abuses of nuclear reactors. One could rephrase the Chinese proverb: Ask a man a question and he inquires for a day; teach a man to question and he inquires for life. Moreover, being asked and learning to pose strong questions might offer students a deeply held, internal blueprint for inquiry -apart from the prods and supports of questions from without. That blueprint would have many of the qualities that teachers' best questions do: range, arc, authenticity. But if the sum is greater than the parts, there might be an additional quality-call it a capacity for question finding (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976).
Question finding is the ability to go to a poem, a painting, a piece of music-or a document, a mathematical description, a science experiment-and locate a novel direction for investigation. This ability is difficult to teach directly, yet it may be one of the most important byproducts of learning in an educational climate in which the questions asked are varied, worth pursuit, authentic, and humanely posed.
Questioning is a social outcome-students need the face-to-face skill of raising questions with other people: clarity about what they don't understand and want to know; the willingness to ask; the bravery to ask again. It is as central in chasing down the meaning of a dance, the lessons of the Korean war, or the uses and abuses of nuclear reactors. One could rephrase the Chinese proverb: Ask a man a question and he inquires for a day; teach a man to question and he inquires for life. Moreover, being asked and learning to pose strong questions might offer students a deeply held, internal blueprint for inquiry -apart from the prods and supports of questions from without. That blueprint would have many of the qualities that teachers' best questions do: range, arc, authenticity. But if the sum is greater than the parts, there might be an additional quality-call it a capacity for question finding (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976).
Question finding is the ability to go to a poem, a painting, a piece of music-or a document, a mathematical description, a science experiment-and locate a novel direction for investigation. This ability is difficult to teach directly, yet it may be one of the most important byproducts of learning in an educational climate in which the questions asked are varied, worth pursuit, authentic, and humanely posed.