Ask more Questions....

While at GAFE Summit North Island this year, I went to one of +Holly Clark's sessions, "The Right Question".
She recommended the two books illustrated here, A More Beautiful Question and Make Just One Change. I have recently received these from The Book Depository and have made a start on A More Beautiful Question.
I am only into the first chapter so far, but it is already inspiring me to make changes to the Year 10 project that will start with their new Technology rotation in a week's time.
The main focus of the book so far has been to wonder why jobs, businesses, companies etc do not encourage more questioning from their employees and what type of questions lead to change. It is talking about changes in the brain and thought processes that occurs when a problem is approached by a series of questions, instead of any other way.

So how am I going to use this in an immediate way?
At the start of a project, we break down the process into a series of tasks. How would it affect the students if they used questions instead of statements?
The best questions to use are not ones that give yes / no / simple answers.
How can we....?
Why does this ... ?
What happens if ...... ?

Asking the right questions gets more depth of understanding.
For example :-
What colour is a stop sign? - this gives a really simple, one word answer.
Why is a stop sign red and what affect does this colour have on the observer? - this gives a much more thorough understanding of colour theory and how it is used in design work.

I want them to come up with questions that will lead to experimenting, trying things out, modelling, analysing in order to get the answers.
Much as I love Google, I don't want them to come up with questions that they can answer with a quick Google search.

Starting small and getting them to ask questions that they can work towards answering themselves is my plan to get them ready to start answering their questions with creativity and design work, which is a more difficult thing to ask them to do.

Is knowledge obsolete? It is so easy to get hold of any information at all.
It is the questioning of this information that is rising in importance.





The Watson Computer.
We can only get what we need out of tools like this by asking the right questions.