What to Ask the Children Instead of “Do You Have Any Questions?”
When children are 2, 3 and 4 years old, they are seething with questions – preschool children ask their parents an average of 100 questions a day . (My daughter seems to be asking these many on the way to school, ” How do the cars stay in line? Who makes the headlights change color? Why don’t they make a wall so the bikes don’t get knocked off? Why do motorcycles” go ahead of us? passionate about the inner workings of traffic.)
But as they get older, requests disappear. To teachers: “Do you have any questions?” during the lesson becomes more of a formality than a serious invitation to deeper exploration. The reason of that? Richard Saul Wurman, the original creator of TED, confines himself to the educational system , saying, “At school we are rewarded for answering, not asking a good question.”
And this is tragic. Asking questions is how we learn, how we develop, how we end up creating things that didn’t exist before. Fortunately, the teachers are making changes. In a tweet, a Louisiana math teacher named Andre Sasser shared that in her classes, she made a simple but powerful tweak to her wording:
Instead of asking, “Do you have questions?” Sasser started asking, “What questions do you have?” That helped. But then she went even further and gave instructions: “Ask me two questions.” And this had a serious impact.
Teachers and parents can try this, and come up with their own ways to pique curiosity. Warren Berger, author of A Better Question , has some great tips to help kids learn to ask questions better, and therefore think better. Best Practice # 1 – Create an environment where it is safe and welcome to ask questions. He points to the Institute for Right Questions , which assists teachers in group question formulation exercises. For example, they might take a statement such as “Pollution is a problem” and ask students to ask 10 great questions about it in 10 minutes. During this time, there should be no answers, no opinions, no disputes, no statements that the question is too simple or naive. As Berger says, “Knowing the answers will help you in school, but knowing how to ask questions will help you in life.”
My daughter went to kindergarten last week, and although she goes to a wonderful school, some of her early comments gave me some anxiety. Yesterday she proudly announced that she deserved a “superstar” for being so quiet. I’m not sure what to think about this. I just don’t want her to lose that natural instinct to throw questions, thoughts, and ideas in a selfless way (politely, of course). So when she keeps asking about vehicle traffic at 7:25 am, I’ll try my best to help her find the answers and then say, “What other questions do you have?”