Question-oriented education

If we are invested in the project of educating for intellectual character, and for intellectual humility in particular, then this conclusion should generate cause for concern. One solution may be to shift from an answer-oriented to a question-oriented education system.

What would a question-oriented education system look like. In essence, it is one in which student questions are at least as important as student answers. Note that the claim is not that we should prefer an education system in which student answers are given no space at all. It is, of course, possible and desirable to cultivate intellectual character by teaching students to know, articulate, and defend answers to the questions that they are asked. Indeed, there may be certain intellectual virtues, for example, rigour, that are better served by a focus on student answering. Moreover, students can learn to exercise intellectual humility in giving answers, as well as in asking questions. Thus, the suggestion is not that we replace answering questions with ask­ing them in any wholesale manner. Rather, we should aim for an education system in which there is a more even balance between cultivating the knowledge and skills to ask questions and the knowledge and skills to answer them. In order to achieve this, the key factors discussed in Section 37.3 would each need to be reoriented towards questioning.

Perhaps most significantly, a question-oriented education system requires a means by which to assess student questions. Without this, it is hard to see how pedagogy and/or cur­riculum design alone will truly reorient the system.

Alongside assessments, question-oriented education requires pedagogy that teaches students (not just teachers) to ask good questions, and curricula designed with that aim in mind. There are promising indications of these question-oriented approaches towards both pedagogy and curriculum design in contemporary education theory and practice. ‘Inquiry-based learning', ‘problem-based learning', ‘case-based learning', and ‘phenomena-based learning' all represent relatively new initiatives in curriculum design and delivery geared towards student-led class­room learning. Insofar as these approaches aim at inspiring students to pursue their own curios­ity and take on roles as autonomous learners, there is a clear role for student questions. ‘Socratic Teaching' and ‘Dialogical Teaching' also provide an opening for student questioning in the class- room.Another specific pedagogical technique designed to help students ask their own questions is found in the Question Formulation Technique developed by the Right Question Institute. This latter is currently being used by over 300,000 educators globally and can be incorporated into the curriculum-based strategies listed above.⁶ These approaches provide a useful indication of what the shift towards a question-oriented system might look like.

How then would a question-oriented education system affect students' willingness and abil­ity to be intellectually humble. Simply put, teaching students to ask questions in the classroom provides them with immediate and tangible opportunities to practice and refine this form of intellectual humility. It requires them to attend to gaps in their knowledge and understanding, to acknowledge their own ignorance about this or that, and to expose this ignorance to their teachers and peers. Over time, this process should not only help students to practice and refine the owning of their intellectual limitations, but to become comfortable and confident in doing so. As the teacher quoted above goes on to say:

having that really supportive environment that allows for Qs to be asked without fear, to allow the students to risk, seems to me to be very important.

(Rich Pierog, Technology and Design teacher, Daegu International School, South Korea)

A question-oriented education system would provide multiple opportunities for teachers to cultivate intellectual humility in the classroom. In fact, I think the question-oriented system would provide opportunities for the cultivations of many others of the intellectual virtues, and for the development of intellectually virtuous character in general (Watson 2018). But for the purposes of this paper, I restrict myself to the conclusion that a reorientation within education away from answers and towards questions would have a positive impact on students' willingness and ability to be intellectually humble.

This conclusion is especially salient if the education system truly is answer-oriented in the way I have described. If knowing the answers is the key, the only key, to formal success in a twenty-first century education, then what incentive do students have for attending to their own ignorance or exposing it to others? If knowledge is power, then it is disempowering not to know. The answer-oriented system is a barrier to intellectual humility.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Mark Alfano, Emma Gordon, and Michael Lynch for useful comments, as well as audiences who attended presentations of this paper as part of the John Templeton Foundation Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. The paper has been made possible by the Leverhulme Trust, grant no. R444. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation or the Leverhulme Trust.

Notes

1 The Latin phrase “ipsa scientia potestas est” (‘knowledge itself is power' or ‘knowledge is His power'), occurs towards the end of the essay ‘Of Heresies' in the Meditationes Sacrae (1597).The phrase “scientia potentia est” (‘knowledge is power') appears for the first time in Latin in the 1668 version of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, who was Bacon's secretary for a period as a young man.

2 Some of the empirical data discussed in this section is also presented and discussed in a recent paper (Watson 2019).

3 Notable exceptions include performance-based subjects such as music, theatre, and dance where a performance element is included, often alongside a question-answer exam.

4 One might wonder if this is, indeed, too simple. If one thinks of teaching as emulative, for example, teacher questioning inside the classroom could be regarded as a model for student questioning outside the classroom. I have argued elsewhere that there is reason to be cautious here and, at the very least, that more empirical data is needed in order to fully understand the effects of teacher questioning on student questioning (Watson 2019). At present, the data indicates that teacher questioning inside the classroom leads to student answering inside the classroom.

5 A prominent alternative to the Limits-Owning account, presented by Roberts and Wood (2007) characterises intellectual humility as an absence of the vices of pride. While I am focusing on the Limits-Owning account here, I think an argument could be made for understanding questioning as (sometimes) an absence of a certain type of pride, and so as a form of intellectual humility in the Roberts and Wood sense. More generally, the claim that questioning is sometimes a form of intellectual humility does not turn on which account of intellectual humility one adopts.

6 https://rightquestion.org/ [Accessed 13 May 2019]

References

Alfano, M., Iurino, K., Stey, P., Robinson, B., Christen, M.,Yu, F., and Lapsley, D. (2017) “Development and validation of a multi-dimensional measure of intellectual humility.” PloS one 12(8): e0182950.

Aschner, M. J. (1961) “Asking questions to trigger thinking.” NEA Journal 50: 44-46.

Bacon, F. (1996/1597) Meditationes Sacrae and Human Philosophy.Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Brualdi,A. (1998) “Classroom questions.” Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation 6(6): 1-3.

Corey, S. M. (1940) “The teachers out-talk the pupils.” The School Review 48(10): 745-752.

Dantanio, M., and Beisenherz, P. (2001) Learning to Question, Questioning to Learn:Developing Effective Teacher Questioning Practices. London: Pearson.

Dantanio, M., and Paradise, L.V (1988) “Teacher question-answer strategy and the cognitive correspond­ence between teacher questions and learner responses.” Journal of Research and Development in Education 21(3): 71-75.

Dillon, J. (1978) “Using questions to depress student thought.” The School Review 87(1): 50-63.

Dillon, J. (1980) “Curiosity as a non sequitur of Socratic questioning.” Journal of Educational Thought 14: 17-22.

Dillon, J. (1981) “To question and not to question during discussion.” Journal of Teacher Education 32(6): 15-20.

Dillon, J. (1982) “The effect of questions in education and other enterprises.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 14(2): 127-152.

Dillon, J. (1988) “The remedial status of student questioning.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 20(3): 197-210. Fahey, G. (1942) “The extent of classroom questioning activity of high-school pupils and the relation of such activity to other factors of pedagogical significance.” Journal of Educational Psychology 33(2): 128-137.

Farrar, M.T. (1983) “Another look at the use of oral questions for comprehension” The Reading Teacher 36: 370-375.

Fusco, Esther. (2012) Effective Questioning Strategies in the Classroom: A Step-by-Step Approach to Engaged Thinking and Learning, K-8. New York:Teachers College Press.

Gall, M. (1970) “The use of questions in teaching” Review of Educational Research 40(5): 707-721.

Gall, M. (1984) “Synthesis of research on teacher's questioning.” Educational Leadership 40: 40-47.

Gayle, B., Preiss, R., and Allen, M. (2006) “How effective are teacher-initiated classroom questions in enhanc­ing student learning?” In Gayle, B., Preiss, R., Burrell, N., and Allen, M. (eds.) Classroom Communication and Instructional Processes: Advances Through Meta-Analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 279-293.

Gershon, M. (2013) How to Use Questioning in the Classroom: The Complete Guide. Mike Gershon: Self-published.

Grow-Maienza, J., Hahn, D. D., and Joo, C.A. (2001) “Mathematics instruction in Korean primary schools: Structures, processes, and a linguistic analysis of questioning.” Journal of Educational Psychology 93(2): 363-376.

Guthrie, J.T. (1983) “Questions as teaching tools.” Journal of Reading 26: 478-479.

Haggard, M. et al. (2018) “Finding middle ground between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servil­ity: Development and assessment of the limitations-owning intellectual humility scale.” Personality and Individual Differences 124: 184-193.

Hazlett, A. (2012) “Higher-order epistemic attitudes and intellectual humility.” Episteme 9(3): 205-223. Hollingsworth, P. M. (1982) “Questioning:The heart of teaching.” The Clearinghouse 55(8): 350-352.

Houston, V. M. (1938) “Improving the quality of classroom questions and questioning.” Educational Administration and Supervision 24: 17-28.

Hunkins, F. P. (1972) Questioning Strategies and Techniques. Boston, MA:Allyn & Bacon.

Johns, J. (1968) “The relationship between teacher behaviors and the incidence of thought-provoking questions by students in secondary schools.” The Journal of Educational Research 62(3): 117-122.

Kidd, I. (2015) “Educating for intellectual humility.” In Baehr, J. (ed.) Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology. NewYork: Routledge, 54-70.

Kleinman, G. (1965) “Teachers' questions and student understanding of science.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 3(4): 307-317.

Martin,V. L., and Pressley, M. (1991) “Elaborative-interrogation effects depend on the nature of the ques­tion.” Journal of Educational Psychology 83(1): 113-119.

Marzano, R. and Simms, J. (2014) Questioning Sequences in the Classroom. Bloomington: Marzano Research Laboratory.

Miller, G., and Pressley, M. (1989) “Picture versus question elaboration on young children’s learning of sentences containing high- and low-probability content.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 48(3): 431-450.

Mishler, E. (1975) “Studies in dialogue and discourse. II: Types of discourse initiated by and sustained through questioning.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 4(2): 99-121.

Pearson, J., and West, R. (1991) “An initial investigation of the effects of gender on student questions in the classroom: Developing a descriptive base.” Communication Education 40(1): 22-32.

Pope, G. (2013) Questioning Technique Pocketbook. Alresford: Teachers' Pocketbooks.

Riley, J. P. (1981) “The effects of preservice teacher's cognitive questioning level and redirecting on student science achievement.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 18(4): 303-309.

Roberts, R., and Wood, J. (2007) Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sachen, J. B. (1999) “Instructing the instructor: Effective questions.” Fire Engineering 52: 130-134.

Susskind, E. (1969) “The role of question-asking in the elementary school classroom.” In Kaplan, F., and Sarason, S. B. (eds.) The Psycho-educational Clinic. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.

Susskind, E. (1979) “Encouraging teachers to encourage children’s curiosity:A pivotal competence.” Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 8(2): 101-106.

Tizard, B., Hughes, M., Carmichael, H., and Pinkerton, G. (1983) “Children's questions and adults' answers.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines 24(2): 269-281.

Watson, L. (2018) “Educating for good questioning: A tool for intellectual virtues education.” Acta Analytica 33(3): 353-370.

Watson, L. (2019) “Educating for inquisitiveness: A case against exemplarism for intellectual character edu­cation.” Journal of Moral Education 48(3): 303-315.

Whitcomb, D., Battaly, H., Baehr, J., and Howard-Synder, D. (2017) “Intellectual humility: Owning our limitations.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94(3): 509—539.

Wilen,WW, and Clegg,A.A. (1986) “Effective questions and questioning:A research review.” Theory and Research in Social Education 14(2): 153—161.

Wright, C., and Nuthall, G. (1970) “Relationships between teacher behaviors and pupil achievement in three experimental elementary science lessons.” American Educational Research Journal 7(4): 477—491.