Transcription
Did Socrates get it right 2,200 years ago? I think so. He was making an argument about the importance of asking questions.
All of you probably had this experience where you've been in a doctor's office and maybe you didn't, you presenting some information, you didn't quite know what to ask. Anybody ever had that experience? Do it ever feel something like this? How about if 30 minutes afterwards, you're on your way home and then you realize, "Oh, that's what I need to ask!" Does it feel like that?
Now, I'm sure nobody here has ever been in a meeting where a question has come up and you spend two hours discussing and deliberating the question, and after two hours, you realize, "That's the wrong question! We just wasted two hours, right?" Has anybody ever had that feeling at all? All right. Does it feel something like this? How about if that first question that came up in two months was assigned to a committee? A committee worked two months on it, and after two months, does this, does this next image feel like that? Sorry, there is no image that could capture that. Okay. All right.
So, our understanding, what we have seen, is that asking questions is the single most powerful renewable source of intellectual energy. It's in our minds. We can create it. We can create it continuously. We need to develop the muscle.
Let's travel from Athens 2,200 years ago to Lawrence, Massachusetts, 20, 20 years ago, 1990. L. Santana and I and colleagues were working with low-income parents who weren't participating in their children's education. We were working on a dropout prevention program, and the parents said, "Well, we don't go to the schools, we don't participate because we don't even know what to ask." So, we were quick. Only took us one or two thousand times of hearing that, realizing, "Well, maybe there's something there." And of course, we did the wrong thing. We gave them a list of questions, and that only produced greater dependency.
So, what we realized was that this is a skill that needs to be developed. And we wondered, "Why is it that adults get to where they are and they're not able to ask their own questions?" So, we looked at skills that are taught in schools. We looked at reading, and you can see kind of a gradual upward slope to, uh, at the age of 18, 70% of students have basic reading skills. Now, look at the next skill, writing. Pretty much the same upward slope. Now, take a look at this one: asking questions. Right? So, there's a problem. And if you doubt that information, just ask the parent of a four-year-old who's at the top the of the slope, and ask a teacher of an 18-year-old. And if there's further doubt, you can reference a New York Times article when they asked college presidents, "What should a student know after four years of college?" And Leon Bin said, "A student should know how to frame a question." Nancy Caner said, "The best we can do for students is have them ask the right questions."
We need to deliberately teach the skill of question-asking. There's enormous potential to that. What we have seen in our work is people learning to ask questions and affecting transformational change. We've seen sugarcane plantation workers in Hawaii who were about to lose their livelihood, not able to affect a corporate board decision, but able to ask questions about how the land was going to be used, how company-owned housing was going to be allocated, what kind of job training alternatives there were. There was a range of things that they were do. Mexican immigrant parents in New Mexico concerned about violence prevention, they were able to focus on, uh, how to, how to get programs for their students, how to get transportation for their children to be able to participate in programs that would keep them out of trouble. We saw patients in community health centers in the Bronx and Bedford-Stuyvesant and in Brooklyn learning how to ask their own questions, participating in their healthcare in ways that their doctors had never seen before. And it all came from learning to ask questions.
So, I'm going to actually share with you in a very quick way, and I'm going to ask you to participate in an exercise using the Question Formulation Technique that we developed. You're going to be able to do this right now with me, and I'm going to share with you also an example of a group that has gone through through the process with some examples of their questions. So, first, I'm going to start off with the question focus, which is basically what's going to be, you're going to be focusing on when you're asking your questions. And there are four rules in order to produce your own questions:
1. Ask as many questions as you can.
2. Do not stop to answer, judge, or discuss the questions.
3. Write down every question exactly as it's stated.
4. Change any statements into questions.
Would there be any difficulty in following these rules? Would you have trouble with any one of the rules? Any one of them in particular might be difficult for you? Number three? Number two? Number one? Right. It's very interesting because it actually requires using the rules to change some of our habits of mind, our practices in being able to generate questions.
So, now let's go to the question focus: "Key obstacles to my learning at TEDx Somerville today." What are some questions that come up? I'm sharing my precious seconds with you. I need you working on with me on this. Yes. Don't know what's going to happen. Thank you. What would be some challenges?
Okay, so let's just think about this. This, the key obstacles to my learning at TEDx today. We've heard some examples of those questions. Now, I'm going to share with you examples from a group that went through this: "Am I paying enough attention?" "What could I do to overcome these obstacles?" "What are those obstacles?" "Do all speakers interest me?" "Is the current speaker boring me?" "Will it help me if I take notes?" "Do I miss anything by tweeting?" "Does tweeting help me pay attention?" "Will I be able to remember key points from each talk?" "What should I be focusing on and why?" "I sit behind this tall guy."
Okay, so let's go to look at questions in a different way. Let's look at open and closed-ended questions. Closed-ended questions require a simple yes or no. Open-ended questions require more explanation. So, look at this, this example here: "Will I be able to remember key points from each talk?" Think about a quick way that you could change that to an open-ended question. "What key points will I be able to remember from each talk?" How? Thank you.
Okay, so let's look at what this, this group came up with. They talked about, "What will help me remember key points from each talk?" Now, very often, we think that it's always important to go from closed-ended to open-ended, but there's real value to also being able to go from open to closed. Let's take that example of, "Why did I sit behind this tall guy?" Check this. Close-ended question: "Is that seat in front of him still available?" Something worth being able to articulate very clearly and very quickly.
Okay, now let's move to a next step: prioritization. Prioritizing your questions. Think about the questions that you saw up here, the questions that you thought about. Think about if there are ones that leap out at you as a particularly important question that you want to think about. So, do a little bit of thinking on prioritization, just for a couple of seconds.
Now, what was a question that you saw up here or you thought about that was particularly important? Looking again at "Key obstacles to my learning at TEDx today." They chose: "What are those obstacles?" which is actually beginning to name the problem. "What should I be focusing on?" which is a transition to look at what can I do to address it. And then they actually took the one that they changed from closed to open and asked, "What will help me remember key points from each talk?" which allows them to really focus on specific steps that they can take.
Okay, so what did you learn? You just produced questions. You saw a process for changing questions and prioritizing questions. More questions are better. Thank you. Presupposing positive outcomes. Okay, so this is what this group came up with. That spending time on questions at first felt like a detour, to spend time on just questions, but it turned out to be a shortcut. Going from an overwhelming problem or something they're not clear how to think about, to being able to come up with specific action steps. And it was all done by asking questions.
So, how did you learn what you learned? This is a question that we always ask people. Engagement. Thank you. So, so what you see here is that people talk about that what they did when they learned this, when they were did the learning, when they figured things out, when they began to problem-solve, they did it by asking questions, by being engaged, by figuring things out themselves, but by using a structured and a rigorous process for doing that that again eliminates some of those two-hour meetings and finding the wrong question.
So, what we've learned from teachers who are using this in the classroom across the country and now around the world is that when they teach their students how to ask their own questions, they feel that they are doing far more effective teaching and there's much deeper learning among the students. This is what a student said in a summer remedial program in Boston who was, uh, about to be held back for a year but spent a summer in a program, and as part of the curriculum, the teacher did superb work teaching the students how to ask their own questions. One young man said at the end, how he felt, he said, "I felt smart." And a second, second student, young woman, said, "I'm getting good at this question thing. It makes me feel smart," which it probably is an agitate they had never used before to describe their experiences in school. And then 3,000 miles away in Palo Alto, um, at a public school where there are children of Stanford faculty and software engineers, this is what a student said using the same process: "Just when you think you know all you need to know, you ask another question and discover how much more there is to learn."
So, why does this process for asking questions work in so many different environments? And this is what we figured out after we spent time and learning from teachers and observing classrooms and thinking about it some more, realized that there are three thinking abilities that are developed. Divergent thinking. The rules for producing questions allow you to go off in many different directions. Then there's convergent thinking. When you begin to think about different kinds of questions, you begin to analyze, synthesize, strategize, and prioritize. You begin to think about your use of questions, what you want to find out. And then there's another piece: metacognitive thinking. And this is an often overlooked but very powerful thinking ability in which you're able to do some thinking about your thinking. So, at different points, I asked you what might be difficult about following the rules, about thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of open and closed-ended questions, about prioritization of your questions, what you learned, how you learned, encouraging people to think about what they were thinking. So, you just produced a lot of questions. It was all about you. And in our work, about people asking their own questions.
So, did Socrates get it wrong? Well, Socrates got right about the importance of questions, but the Socratic method very often depends upon a wise person at the front of the room leading the less wise. No, no, no, nothing personal here, okay? It's not about you and me, um, leading the less wise through a process in which they learn by from the questions being asked by the wise person at the front. So, part of what we've been trying to look at is how do you build people's capacity to do this thinking for themselves?
So, what happens if we don't ask our own questions? Think about that. Think about that if we're always dependent on others to be asking questions for us. So, let's return to Lawrence and the what the parents there offered us. They named the obstacle to their participation, but as we spent more time on it, we realized that they also named an obstacle to learning, an obstacle to creativity, and an obstacle to change. But by naming the problem so clearly, in ways that very few people have done, they also identified the solution. Questions are a renewable source of intellectual energy. The potential is there all the time. If we want to use that renewable energy to improve education for all students, to promote a creative economy, and to build a stronger democracy, what obstacles do we have to overcome? Thank you.