One of my favorite moments in class is when a student says something like, “I think I have a question, but I’m not sure how to put it…” This blog post is about why that is one of my favorite moments.
About 7 or 8 years ago, after giving an assignment that involved writing some questions about reading, a student responded by asking, “What do we do if we don’t have any questions?” Another student said, “Yeah, what if we can’t find one?” My initial reaction was one of anxiety—it was a question I did not know how to respond to because intuitively I felt that it was a completely preposterous scenario (who could ever be without a question?!). Thankfully I did not respond in that spirit, and I did my best to offer a quick tip. The experience stuck with me, though, eventually prompting me to wonder why that question first filled me with anxiety. What was clear was that I found the question unrelatable to my own experience of reading or thinking—it simply had never occurred to me that I could ever find myself without a question. This meant that I was confronting a question I had genuinely not considered. Pedagogically, how could I help students find their questions if I didn’t have a sense of how my own questions were found in the first place? And is that even the right framing? Are questions actually the sorts of things that are found? Or are they created? Or do they grow up over time? I did not really know what was going on for students when they were struggling to ask questions, because I didn’t really understand much about the experience of asking questions in the first place.
I teach at the Arrupe College at Loyola University Chicago—a small, associate degree-granting liberal-arts program for students from the Chicagoland area, many of whom are the first in their family to attend college. Most of the courses I teach fulfill some of Loyola’s general education requirements, and most students arrive at their first philosophy class with some mixture of curiosity, excitement, and trepidation. Because of that, one of my primary personal goals is to affirm students’ abilities to engage philosophically with the world (including to engage philosophically with the discipline of philosophy, though that is not my priority). Particularly in that first philosophy course, I focus on creating opportunities for students to cultivate or hone their abilities to ask good questions—of themselves, others, the world, and so on.
With that in mind, this post considers some of the following questions: What might be happening when, especially students, are struggling to ask good questions? What does that struggle look or sound like? In particular, what assumptions about question-asking seem to be at work in the way that students (we?) both practice question-asking and talk about questions? These questions are intended to address what Pat Hutchings has called “What is”-type questions that occur in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. That is, as opposed to running immediately to questions about “what works” or how to fix a problem (consider how much talk about teaching is in the style of quick-fixes or “hacks”), I am simply aiming to understand better what is happening in the first place. I am not convinced that we have a sufficient grasp of “what is” when it comes to question-focused teaching and learning—which makes sense given the relative paucity of attention to the topic in general. Admittedly, offering a strong answer to the above questions would require gathering some empirical information about the sorts of things that students actually say about, or commonly do with questions. Since I only have anecdotal evidence to work with, what follows is more of an invitation to take notice and consider what may be happening in your own teaching context. Let me know what you think.
Asking good questions can be a struggle. But not all struggle is equally valuable, and it seems to me that there are a few common assumptions about questions that create the wrong kinds of struggle. Let’s call these the related assumptions of question-essentialism, question-intellectualism, question-ownership, and question-completion. In the rest of the post, I focus on identifying ways that these assumptions generate frustrating struggles to ask good questions for many students and teachers. While I don’t offer any tips for what teachers might do in response, I do gesture at an alternative way to think about question-asking that might be useful for thinking more about, or at least lead to better forms of struggle.
Before going further, I want to address one additional possible assumption. I hesitate to name it as such since it is not really clear to me what the belief or the status of the belief actually is. I’m referring here to the stock phrase “There’s no such thing as a bad question.” When I ask students to share some common beliefs about questions, the phrase invariably comes up. When I ask students if they actually believe that, many (most?) say that they do. Many then attempt to give some justification for it at least insofar as they think it is a useful fiction for creating a more open and welcoming atmosphere in which questions can be asked and discussed. They are, and they think the phrase is, working against a common fear of asking questions in various settings. What is interesting to me is that the belief—whether or not it is true (I think it is false)—does not actually seem to do the work that we might hope it would. No matter how explicitly a student or teacher believes that there is no such thing as a bad question, something like aliefs about questions seem to continue to operate independently (Gendler). An alief is a quasi-belief that operates more or less unconsciously by automatically linking together a perception, an emotional response, and a judgment (I see something that looks like dog poop, prompting an emotional response—Yuck!—and a judgment about what to do—Don’t eat it!). Importantly, our aliefs can conflict with our conscious beliefs at the same time: I may consciously understand that this is simply chocolate formed in the shape of dog poop (an example that is, alas, sold out), and perfectly fine to eat, but because of my alief, I still don’t want to eat it. Although I might believe that “there are no such things as bad questions,” I may still alieve the following: “There are good/bad questions,” “asking questions is bad or embarrassing,” “we make negative judgments about people who ask bad questions,” and so on. Thus, when a student encounters an opportunity to ask a question in class, their aliefs may prompt an emotional response (feels scary, embarrassing, risky) and an intuitive judgment (don’t do it!) regardless of what they explicitly say they believe about question-asking when prompted. I see at least two results from this.
The first is that many students continue to fear asking questions, and our stock phrases do nothing to reassure them since the problem is at the level of aliefs not beliefs. The second is that both the explicit beliefs and implicit aliefs about questions—despite pulling in opposite directions—conspire together to create a reluctance to engage in the difficult work (a productive struggle) of learning to ask better questions.
At the level of the belief, if there is no such thing as a bad question, then why worry about working to improve our question-asking? Does this mean that every question is automatically a good (or good enough) one? Or is perhaps the language of good/bad simply inapplicable, making every question permanently neutral with respect to its quality?
At the same time, if asking questions is as risky as our aliefs suggest, then why spend precious time and energy on it? To engage in question-asking in front of others—if it is true that there are good/bad questions—means that we likely will be practicing something imperfectly, often failing, and risking the negative judgments of our peers.
If teachers believe that questioning is a skill that can be cultivated, and if we would like to help students improve that skill in their own lives, then we will need to track some of the interesting ways in which potential assumptions about questions may be in play for some of our students and perhaps for ourselves as well, and then design our question-pedagogies in response.
The assumptions I discuss below may have varying degrees and relationships to one another: that is, a student may be working with all of them simultaneously, or with only one or two, and to greater or lesser degrees. Regardless, I suspect that they can all be grouped under the heading of the more general assumption that asking questions is “natural” or “comes naturally” to humans (after all, don’t children ask lots of good questions?!).
Question-essentialism is the belief that asking questions is something like an instinct or part of the normal course of natural development in humans. Asking questions is easy and should not be a struggle insofar as it comes naturally. This assumption shares something in common with certain ethical views of human nature, such that by nature humans have a tendency towards goodness (or towards asking questions), and so it is a society that corrupts us, causing our behaviors and values to become morally distorted (we stop asking questions). A simple internet search reveals a host of media devoted to identifying the impact that various social forces or institutions (Cell phones! Schools! Laziness!) have on an apparent decline in asking questions that occurs from childhood into teenage and adult years (for example). Likewise, if we could just somehow get rid of those harmful influences, then our questions would automatically be good ones, given our questioning nature. Question-essentialism therefore blocks the recognition of just how much productive struggle—learning—may be needed to ask a good question. The assumptions I discuss below each seem to link up with question-essentialism in different ways. Regardless of whether question-essentialism is true (I doubt it), the assumptions I discuss below are harmful offshoots even if they contain some kernels of truth.
Question-intellectualism
At the risk of creating confusion by using a term that already has application in other philosophical areas, question-intellectualism names the assumption that questions arise and live in our heads as psychological phenomena. An individual “has” a question “in mind,” or can “find” a question through introspection. To question requires looking inward to see if there are any questions lying around in one’s head.
Students who are working with question-intellectualism may become frustrated when they introspect and come up empty-handed. Not finding a question ready-to-hand in their heads, they do not know how to generate their own questions. I suspect this may be what is going on when students strongly identify with the experience of coming to a question as though they just “pop up” in their minds suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. If I ask students what they do when they want to ask a question, many say something like “I just sit there and wait for a question to pop in my head.” From the perspective of question-essentialism, this makes sense. If questioning is something innate or essential to humans (again, even children can do it!), then we don’t need to worry much about how the process happens, since it is not something under our control. If coming to a question is out of our control, then the best we can do is “sit there and wait” for a question to descend on us from some mysterious nowhere. Once again, there is no skill to be learned or improved upon, and if no question “comes to mind” then we certainly shouldn’t be graded badly just because the question muse did not come through for us. Asking questions should not be a struggle, and we should not be assessed according to our engagement with a pseudo-struggle.
Question-ownership
A related frustration occurs when a student does generate a question, but I ask them to heavily revise it in some way: The reason I call this question-ownership is because there is a tendency here to identify with what one has cooked up—as in, this is “my” question. Asking a student to revise “their” question may feel especially frustrating for a student—especially if they also believe that there is no such thing as a bad question. Such an assumption may create a tendency to lean into what Carol Dweck has called a fixed- as opposed to a growth-mindset (Cf. some of Dweck’s more recent comments on this). To the extent that we do not understand that good questions are an achievement, then we may miss out on the opportunities to develop our questions in deeper, more interesting directions. Once again, questioning should not be a struggle since it comes naturally, and certainly not a struggle to the degree that it feels when asked to revise or to find a different way to ask a question. I suspect this might also be a feature of the annoyance felt towards philosophers who, instead of “just answering the question,” respond by asking follow-up questions.
Question-completion
Question-completion names the assumption that, once asked, a question feels somehow solid, and fully formed. I can have a question in mind almost like I have a pen in hand. If “my” question lacks this feeling, then it must either be half-baked or was just not worth picking up in the first place and so it’s back to waiting for a new one to pop into my mind. The fear or the struggle to ask a question is particularly a problem when students believe that their peers’ questions—like their comments—are completed, “polished and sage contributions” (Feito, 13) whereas their own are vague, ill-formed, and ignorant. That is to say, the willingness to offer and engage in truly open-ended questioning and discussion is correlated to how strong a student’s belief that their peers have it all figured out (or that the teacher expects or at least prefers that).
There seems to be some evidence suggesting that many students tend to prefer discussing topics in class about which they have personal experience and/or strong views, and, conversely, tend not to prefer discussing a topic about which they have little experience and/or no strong views (Trosset). It feels good, and safe, to (think that we) know what we are talking about. To the extent that a genuine question involves the asker in a topic that they do not already have settled answers for (i.e., it is not just a rhetorical or merely didactic question), questions require acknowledging what we do not know, are curious about, or have some doubts about (for different approaches to this idea, see Whitcomb, Watson, and Weston and Bloch-Schulman). It may therefore be the case—but research would be needed here—that students struggle with asking questions to the extent that they struggle with saying “I don’t know” or acknowledging their confusion or difficulties in front of peers or the public generally—i.e., precisely where they do not feel themselves to be on solid ground. Question completion may therefore be a way to try to mitigate that kind of concern—i.e., never ask a question until it’s “ready.”
Conclusion
Perhaps to ask good questions we simply need to avoid the aforementioned assumptions, and instead do something like the opposite. For example, we should get out of our heads and into the world, together with others, risking half-baked, ill-formed questions and working together over time to continually reshape them until we arrive at something good even if we can’t identify exactly who the question belongs to now. For it is that initial spark, often little more than a vague intuition bathed with confusion, which begins the stumbling journey toward a good question. To ask a good question is an interpersonal accomplishment. And, more or less, that is what I think, or at least what I would like to think more about. As I said above, one of my favorite moments in class is when a student says, “I think I have a question, but I’m not sure how to say it…” and then proceeds to try, with other students nodding along because they recognize that there is something there worth wondering about. Affirming a place for this kind of not-knowing in the classroom contributes to the generative potential for further, more complex conversations (Feito, 11-12) and, I suspect, for better questions as well. Of course, what all this might look like in practice in your own pedagogical context is another question (Erica Stonestreet offers another good perspective on this).
And yet, before proceeding to any pedagogical “fixes,” I want to encourage more reflection on “what is.” What is happening—and what is not happening—when we ask good questions? I don’t know.
Giancarlo Tarantino
Giancarlo Tarantino is a Clinical Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago. His research interests are in hermeneutics, Aristotle, and teaching and learning. He is currently Chair of the APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy. He recently adopted a cat named Myrtle.
