Posing Questions—Part II: Teaching Curiousity

The following excerpts of David’s upcoming book, Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach: Reflections on Education as Transformation through Dialogue (Summer, 2014), are used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Perhaps curiosity is a character trait that cannot be taught. But maybe it can be picked up by example or contagion or osmosis. You see someone who is fascinated with things and loves to investigate them, and you are just drawn to imitate that person.

Reason Enough

That possibility may be reason enough for a teacher to model curiosity and the practice of asking questions. When I was a student, I always wished the lecturers would share the questions that got them into their discipline or that lay behind their ideas. They just gave the statement of the problem, the evidence, and the outcomes, but not the passions that drove them to investigate a problem in the first place. Now, as a teacher, if I want students to ask provocative questions, even questions that challenge my own views, I have to pose provocative questions as well. And I have to show a willingness to be open to challenges of my own views.

Focus on Fascination

When I first started teaching, most of my questions were a cat and mouse game of “Guess what’s in my mind.” I had the answer, and I was trying to get students to come up with the same thing I was thinking. Nobody wins this game. I noted that the students were often frustrated by this, but I did not know what to do—until I read Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Postman and Weingarten.

The authors argue that teachers should never ask a question to which they already had the answer! Of course, this limits the types of question. It may be a factual question of uncertainty to which there were several answers possible. Or it may be a question for which the teacher surely does not have an answer, such as, “What do you (students) think about this?” Or the question might be an opinion question to which the teacher also has an opinion but not an answer. And the teacher should avoid offering their own opinion except as one point of view in a class discussion. I have sought to follow this advice and have found that this approach indeed does focus more on fascination and exploration than on answers. Hence, it tends to engender curiosity.

Can “Safe Questions” and Curiosity Coexist?

At the same time, I am convinced that question-asking is a skill that can be learned. You may need innate or acquired curiosity to make use of this skill. But if you have curiosity, you also need skills to investigate and explore something. Maybe students naturally have questions, and our approach to teaching stifles or discourages them. Even when students have curiosity, the failure to ask questions is, in part, related to fear. This anxiety has to be addressed before students will feel free to exercise their curiosity. After all, “curiosity killed the cat”—so what might it do to a student in a classroom!

If I were a student, I might ask a question and get a response from the teacher that would make me feel like “I thought I would die!” This is understandable. The whole idea of a question is that it exposes our ignorance. We do not know something, and so we ask about it. But what if everyone else already knows the answer? What if the teacher will make it appear foolish that I asked about this? At all costs, as a student, I will not do anything to embarrass myself in front of my fellow students. Perhaps a student has had a bad experience in the past where a teacher ridiculed a question or where students resented you for taking up the class time or for asking a “dumb question.” So, the student is saying: “I’ll be very careful about asking a question. I’ll think it through carefully and be sure it will be a safe question.”

Don’t Skirt the Good Stuff

It has always been strange to me how students will skirt some of the most important questions, because they just do not ask them about the teacher, her views of things, why she thinks this or that, what drives her. Sometimes when I give a guest appearance in another class, those students will be emboldened to ask me a lot about my personal view of things. Maybe it is because I am novel to them or because they will not be graded by me. I do not know. But I wish that students were more proactive in this regard.

It is amazing all that I do not share with a class about myself, my background, my passions, my point of view, because they do not ask. It is also amazing how students who are asking questions out of a great desire to know “what I know” and “what I think about things” are able to draw things out of me—things I did not even know were in there! I wish that the question time were more like that, not only in terms of their questions of me (and their questioning me) but also in terms of my questions of them.

A Return to Hospitality

So, how can we create a hospitable atmosphere in which question-asking is an integral and valued part of the classroom experience for students and teachers alike? Maybe we need to be absolutely clear that we actually, really, honestly do want questions! To try and generate an atmosphere hospitable for questions, I have sometimes said, “You may have had a bad experience in the past asking questions in class. But I want you to know I welcome them. I know you may feel they expose what you do not know. But that is the whole point of learning. I hope we can work together in the learning process for you to clarify to me what I need to explain or explore better. I am depending on that. I am counting on you to ask for clarification and to explore what you are learning. Questions will enable me to teach better and you to learn better.” Then we need to act in such a way as to foster and maintain that atmosphere.

My next post in this series will be on the strategies I’ve developed to avoid things that hinder questions and to do things that foster questions.

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