I recently re-watched a TED Talk from Regina Dugan that proposes the question “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?”. The talk is quite inspiring and starts to get your mind going, but I believe her question does even more. It reminded me that asking questions can be powerful, especially so in education. Ironically, in education we tend to be more about getting answers than asking questions. When I look back at my own classroom, I am as guilty as anyone and I am currently trying hard to break out from that cultural expectation of schools while at the same time immersing myself in “the system”. It is a system that is not broken in that it gives us the product it was designed to produce. Students who are, for the most part, compliant and able to follow directions. However, I am not sure that is the best approach for our children’s future and so I would ask the question, “What do kids need most that we, as educators, are uniquely able to provide?”and as a follow up “How can we provide that service to all kids?”.
If I had the answer, I suspect I would be sitting on my own private beach somewhere in the Caribbean instead of my living room couch. However, that is what is so great about asking questions. I don’t have to know the answer in order to ask the question. That seems like an obvious statement, but not so much in schools. How many times do we as educators ask a question to our students that we already know the answer? How many times do students expect us to know the answer because we are the teacher? When you live in an answer driven environment, you only ask questions you know the answers to and you only answer questions for which you know how to respond to the question . Very little risk of failure on either side takes place and as a result learning or growth is stunted. Asking a question to which you don’t know the answer can be complex and messy.
In his book, “A More Beautiful Question”, Warren Berger points out “Part of being able to tackle complex and difficult questions is accepting that there is nothing wrong with not knowing” (Berger, 2014, p.186). He also points out there are four reasons people tend to avoid asking questions.
- Questioning is seen as counterproductive; it’s the answers that most people are focused on finding.
- The right time to ask fundamental questions never presents itself (too early or too late).
- Knowing the right question to ask is difficult (better not to ask).
- What if we find we have no good answers to the important questions we raise?
Being comfortable with being uncomfortable is not easy to do when you are in a class of 25-30 students, but I wonder if that is a window into what schools could uniquely provide to kids?
I have seen this happen in pockets as I travel in and out of classrooms in my school district. Teachers in an ELA class conferencing with students and asking questions like, “How has the main character changed over time in your story?” even though the teacher has never read the student’s book before is one example. In a different class I have observed students in a math class being shown a picture of two Dominios with the teacher asking, “What do you notice?” or “What do you wonder?”. There is no way to know where that conversation is going to go for sure. However, a teacher who puts himself in situations that allow kids to get comfortable with observing and developing their own questions helps kids to become more mathematical in their thinking. These questions combined with the teacher being comfortable enough, and knowing the content enough, to recognize where the students’ mathematical understanding is at and then ask the next best question for students to build their understanding is a great way to pull kids into math. Both of these examples are complex and messy, but effective and impactful. The great thing about either of these examples is that the conversations, and therefore the learning, is not limited to what the teacher knows. Each situation will be unique to the group of students who are asked the questions. The other piece to remember here is the only way get to better at having “uncomfortable” conversations with kids is to put yourself in more of these situations.
Questioning may be seen as slowing the “learning” process (coverage of material actually) because it takes time, particularly by those who believe that what the students need are answers. However, it is precisely the process, not the product, that helps students learn. When a classroom culture is inquisitive, the questioning becomes more natural and the learning and sharing between students is only limited by the teacher’s intolerance to ambiguity. I know, this is probably only the start to an answer. Remember, I said I didn’t know the answer when I asked the question. However, I do feel we have to start asking the questions to shift our culture in education to valuing questions over answers. I realize it is messy, complex, and not easy but a more scary question to me is, “What if we do nothing?”.
References
Berger, Warren (2014). A More Beautiful Question. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing.
No comments:
Post a Comment