It’s common for people to have significant difficulty asking meaningful and important questions even in situations where asking those questions is their number one task. Part of the problem is emotional fear and social reluctance. We’re all shy at some level and usually loath to actively make ourselves look foolish to others, so instead of speaking up we remain silent and try and blend into the background – a poor choice when we’re actually trying to learn something.
I see this in the early part of the semester where students in a class have not fully bonded together and have limited trust of each other. I also see it in tour groups of prospective students and their parents. None of them want to be thought of as the people who don’t know what’s going on or show how little background they may have. Silence seems to be the cloak of invisibility that gets pulled over their heads to let time pass in those slow tick, tick, ticks, hopeful that someone else will ask or that it’ll all be over soon. Sad.
Unfortunately people seem to think that questions are like arrows that must be shot directly into the center of the target to be useful or feel important. That’s wrong, or less critically, that’s not a useful understanding of the function of the art of questioning. First, it’s not a competition. It’s a dialogue. That means it’s more like ping-pong, but it’s not a game anyone should try to win. Think of it more as an extended practice session. The longer you can keep the volley going the more practiced and developed each of you become. It’s the flow that’s the goal, not hitting the ball off the table. If you try to win, you lose.
Asking questions is like open-air thinking. Part of it is conversation, part of it is inspiration and part is effective listening. The goal is to move understanding from one person to another and maybe even back again. A sequence of good questions can lead a conversation, highlight lack of clarity or reveal insights.
Done well it offers participants the pleasure of discovery and the gratification of personal growth. Done poorly it may feel like a knife fight or the demeaning harassment of bullies. Ouch, don’t want to do that again do you? In a classroom people are not opponents, they’re colleagues and friends. In large open lectures that may be less so, and yes, perhaps more confrontational at that, though if you’re trying to win it’s a unattractive sport. But our goal should always be directed to personal development and, alas, practicing to withstand bullies may play a useful part of that after all.
I admit that one of the fundamental problems with using questions for learning is that you have to follow the dialogue. What, you actually have to follow the thread of the discussion - astonishing. A useful question pauses the speaker and informs them that there might be some vagueness in what they just said, or there’s some confusion about how a statement might apply to a variant of the situation. The point is to address an uncertainty directly related to or just slightly a variation of what was said. If you didn’t get what they just said you derail the flow, there’s an abrupt stop and then you all have to realign and start in again hopefully with more attuned listening.
Another useful result of asking questions is reverse interrogation. The speaker discovers from the questioner just how far off the track they are from the questions they ask. A pointed question shows both people are aligned while an inappropriate question shows the questioner is way off base. Both are useful, though one requires a lot more work to get back on track.
Our Hampshire mode is, I believe, to value the question even more than the answer. I keep telling students in the film building to beware of easy technological answers because they have a finite shelf life and soon become the wrong answer, but by being able to ask the appropriate interrogating question you can derive the correct answer yourself again and again. It's not the answers that set you free it's the questions.
gunther 12-10-2013
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