There Is
Such a Thing as a Stupid Question
By MAUREEN
DONOHUE-SMITH
Always trying
to get my students to participate in class, I find myself regularly
exhorting them: "Please feel free to ask questions. There is no
such thing as a stupid question." Yet even as I speak, I know I
am not being completely honest. In fact, the students and I are all
painfully aware that, like beauty, the stupidity of a question is in
the eye of the beholder.
Questions
aren't asked in a vacuum; their intelligence or stupidity depends on
a variety of contextual variables. The ideal question is the right
one, posed to the right source in the right way at the right time
for the right reasons. My students know as well as I do that the
questions we ask speak volumes about us — and that what they say
isn't always complimentary.
Cut to the
faculty lounge, where a professor is venting her exasperation: "Can
you believe he interrupted our discussion of Hegel to ask how long
the paper should be? I went over that
threetimes in class, and it's
right there on the syllabus!" Her colleagues nod and agree that they
never would have asked their professors such an ill-timed question.
Then
eavesdrop on an introductory psychology course, in which a student
waves wildly to attract the teacher's attention. It's only two weeks
into the term, but already he is notorious for asking at least 10
questions per class, few of which rise above the level of "How do
you spell that?" This time he begins with the classic defensive
maneuver, "I know this is a stupid question, but ..."
The nonverbal
reactions of his classmates are unmistakable: Some students sigh,
while others compress their lips in irritation. Not wanting to
stifle student participation, the teacher patiently responds, but
the thread of the discussion unravels, and class momentum slows.
To paraphrase
a common axiom: Answer a student's question, and you have educated
her for a day; teach a student how to question, and you have
educated her for a lifetime.
Saying that
there are no stupid questions devalues the process of inquiry.
Questions are the engines that power the growth of knowledge, and we
cannot rely solely on a random interrogatory process. Although
unstructured strategies such as brainstorming and free association
have their uses, we need to balance them with a disciplined approach
to questioning. Students must learn to expand on initial answers as
they ask new questions.
Professors
can help students make their questions more intelligent.
-
Demonstrate how
to organize information. Think out loud to show how you organize
complex material, and focus on the most important elements. Shift
paradigms, discussing a topic from different perspectives.
Challenge underlying assumptions.
-
Require students
to ask questions in class. Research on students' attention spans
suggests pausing every 15 or 20 minutes
to allow students to organize their notes and summarize important
points. During those pauses, ask groups of three or four students
to think of several significant questions about what they're
learning. Have them share the questions with the rest of the
class, ask why they consider them important, and ask other
students to modify the questions.
-
Encourage
students to answer their own questions. It is usually easier to
ask the professor for information, but students become more
effective learners if they have multiple strategies for finding
information. Referring them to the library for some answers is a
good way to expand their research strategies beyond
Google. Setting up an online chat room
for the course allows students to ask each other questions, and
monitoring that discussion allows you to assess the quality of the
questions and answers and bring up in a future class any issues
that remain unresolved.
-
Teach students
about the different types of questions.In
the 1950s, Benjamin S. Bloom, a professor of education at the
University of Chicago, developed a taxonomy
of educational objectives. Professors can use his system, which
arranges cognitive behaviors along a continuum from simple to
complex, to guide students' choices of the appropriate level of
question.
To begin
with, professors should consider how much students know. For
instance, do they need basic facts? Can they demonstrate
understanding by paraphrasing, explaining, or giving examples? Can
they extract principles and apply them to other problems? Can they
analyze arguments and identify underlying assumptions?
In using
Bloom's model, however, a caveat is in order. Bloom and other
scholars did not consider one category of question superior to
another, but people often assume that more-complex, "higher order"
questions are intrinsically better than simple fact-seeking ones. We
should avoid such a hierarchical interpretation of the categories,
thinking instead of them as arranged in a feedback loop. The answers
to higher-order questions either support or challenge the
questioner's data and thus cycle back to a potential reconfiguration
of prior knowledge. Students may question facts, rethink
interpretations, or challenge generalizations at any point.
·
Help your
students understand questions' subtexts. Sometimes people ask
questions without really wanting to acquire information. Think of
the question-and-answer period following a presentation at a
professional conference: Some members of the audience ask questions
to offer support to the speaker; others ask them to attack,
embarrass, or discredit him; still others ask them to demonstrate
their own superior knowledge.
A student may
also have motives for a question beyond the simple pursuit of
knowledge. But whether or not students' questions affect how the
professor or their peers view them, once students move to the
workplace, they are likely to be judged by what they ask.
We must help
them recognize how a question's content and timing can send a
message about the questioner, whether intended or not. For instance,
when a student asks about due dates or how long the research paper
should be, she is saying that she hasn't read the syllabus.
As faculty
members, we certainly do not want to constrain students' curiosity;
we want to create environments where they can experiment with new
perspectives, where they feel free to ask broad, even playful,
questions. However, to stop there is to fall short of our
responsibility as educators. If we say that all questions are
created equal and that there is no such thing as a stupid question,
we are not teaching students to think critically.
Students must
learn to handle requests for information with care. After all, some
questions may be loaded.
Maureen
Donohue-Smith is an assistant professor of human services at
Elmira College.
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