It’s always a good time for asking questions, but next week is an especially good time: March 13 to 19 is “Question Week 2016.” Timed to coincide with Master Questioner Albert Einstein’s birthday on March 14 (aka Pi Day), this is the third year I’ve partnered with the Right Question Institute and other organizations that champion questioning to designate a special time to put the focus on the power of questions.

Here’s how it works: During Question Week, participating businesses, schools and classrooms across the U.S will conduct questioning exercises or activities, sharing the results on social media. The website QuestionWeek.com provides guidance and tips on possible questioning exercises or activities schools can do. There are also tips for parents, organizations, businesses, or other individuals that want to participate.

Also during that week, various special events are planned to illuminate the importance and the power of questioning. When you visit the Question Week website next week, click on “Latest News” at the top to discover how beautiful questions are changing the world around us. You’ll also learn how to ask better questions yourself. And everyone will be encouraged to share their questions on the site, as well as on Twitter and Facebook (#QuestionWeek).

The goal is to flood the Internet with questions! And in the process, we hope to generate awareness and momentum around the importance of good questioning.

We invite everyone to visit the Question Week site and think about how you can participate and spread the word about questioning, curiosity, and inquiry.

Below are two of the many articles on QuestionWeek.com to get you going.
 

5 Ways to Participate in Question Week

Students/teachers/schools   Organize a question-related group activity (or multiple activities!) during Question Week. Here are some suggested exercises/activities. Be creative: feel free to put a fresh spin on an existing exercise—or come up with a completely original one. (And send us your results.)

Parents and families   Some of the same activities and exercises that work in the classroom (see above link) can also be done at home. And here’s another activity, perfect for families: work together on formulating one big, shared “mission question” that family members can all explore and work on together!

Companies/organizations   Designate at least one time during Question Week for a question-related activity. You might do a “Question-storming” session (a great alternative to traditional brainstorming). Or, try tackling a big challenge facing your organization by applying the “Why / What if / How” sequence of questioning. If you’re really ambitious, try coming up with a “Mission Question” for your organization.

Individuals   Question Week is a perfect time to step back and ask yourself some big, meaningful questions—about your life, your work, your passion and purpose. You can use questioning to try to get pesky little things done or overcome big fears. And here’s how you can formulate and then follow your own personal “Beautiful Question.”

Everyone   Share your questions! This is the key to making Question Week come alive! Whether you’re a group of students, co-workers, family members, or a solo questioner, you can use the Twitter hashtag #QuestionWeek—as well as our dedicated Facebook page—to connect with other questioners around the world during Question Week. If you’re doing group exercises, share the results—including photos taken at your Q-storms, lists of questions generated, favorite question of the day. If you’ve come up with a Beautiful Question of your own, or a “How Might We” question for your organization or school, tell the world about it. During Question Week, we’ll feature an ongoing live Twitter stream (see the footer of this page), and as the week winds down, we’ll pull it altogether in one place, via Storify—so you can see your own Beautiful Question there with all the others.
 

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    Exercises to Build Your Questioning Muscles

 

1) The Question Formulation Technique 

In a lot of classrooms, the teachers ask the questions, and the kids are expected to come up with one right answer. But the Right Question Institute is working to ensure kids don’t lose the important ability to ask their own questions. Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana of RQI have a developed a wonderfully simple, fun, and highly effective exercise designed to encourage students to generate lots of questions. The process is explained in detail in Rothstein and Santana’s book Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions—a must-read for teachers or anyone interested in improving education. And you can also find lots of information about the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) on the Right Question Institute website. In a nutshell, here’s how it works:

• Teachers design a “Question Focus.” This involves coming up with a premise or opening statement that can provide a focal point for generating questions from the students. (e.g., “Technological change” or “Curiosity in the classroom” or “Pollution is a problem”). Don’t use a question as a starting point—it’s easier to form questions around a statement or a phrase.
• Students produce questions. Within a time limit, students (usually broken up into small groups), are supposed to generate and write down questions pertaining to that Q-Focus. Only questions are welcome—no opinions or answers, no debating which questions are best; the idea is to just keep inquiring about the subject from different angles.

• Students improve their questions. At a certain point, students begin to work on the questions they’ve written down; they open the closed questions, and close the open ones. For example, an open question that began as Why is torture effective? might be changed to a closed one: Is torture effective? In doing this, students learn that a question can be narrowed down in some cases, expanded in others—and they begin to see that “the way you ask a question yields different results and can lead you in different directions,” Rothstein explains.
• Students prioritize their questions. They are typically instructed to come to agreement on three favorites.
• Students and teachers decide on next steps, in terms of acting on the prioritized questions.
• Students reflect on what they have learned. The process is designed to be simple enough that teachers can learn it in an hour, and students can grasp it immediately. “Making it simple was the hard part,” Rothstein told me—that basic formula took about a decade to produce. For the students taking part in the exercise, it can be challenging, Rothstein acknowledges, because “it requires them to do something they’ve never done—to think in questions.”

2) “10 Questions in 10 minutes”

Julie Grimm, a second grade teacher based in Hagerstown, MD, told me she does a question exercise called 10 in 10—in which students are expected to come up with 10 questions about a topic in 10 minutes. Says Grimm, “Then they have to decide which of those questions are the best ones to research. They’ll use those questions to come up with a book they produce.”
 

3) Why / What If / How

In my research on questioning, I found that innovators and inventors often solve problems by asking Why, What If, and How questions—in that order. (To learn more about why the “Why / What If / How” sequence of questioning is so effective at problem-solving, read These three questions can help you tackle any problem.) To try a Why / What If / How exercise, come up with a problem for kids to tackle (e.g., “Students aren’t using the school library enough”) and challenge the students to start using Why questions to explore reasons behind the problem; then use What If questions to try to come up with imaginative ideas for solutions; then use practical How questions to try to make those “What If” ideas more realistic and actionable.

4) “How Might We” mission questions

If you don’t know about the power of asking questions that begin with “How Might We,” read The Secret Phrase Top Innovators Use. As my article notes, this form of questioning is used by powerhouse companies such as Google and Facebook to come up with big ideas. But there’s no reason students can’t come up with their own “How Might We” questions, too! Ask the group to think about some of the issues or challenges they’re most interested in. Together, try to come up with 5 to 10 big “How Might We” questions to address some of those challenges (e.g., “How might we help kids in our community who are hungry?”). Once you have a list, see if the group can agree on one “How Might We” question to adopt and work on together in days ahead—that can become the group’s “mission question.”

5) The 5 Whys

The “5 Whys” originated in Japan and is credited to Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries. For decades, the company used the practice of asking “why” five times in succession as a means of getting to the root of a particular problem. For example, when a faulty car part came out of a factory, asking why the first time would yield the most obvious answer (e.g., an assembly line worker made a mistake). But by then asking why the mistake occurred, an underlying cause might surface—such as, insufficient training on that task. Asking why again, the company might discover the training program was underfunded, which would lead to questioning why it was underfunded. The 5 whys is not just applicable to making cars—it can be used to analyze almost any problem. The design firm IDEO, which is a big practitioner of the 5 Whys methodology, offers this as an example of how asking 5 whys can help you dig down to a deeper truth.

For a classroom questioning exercise, put some problems in front of the group, and together, try subjecting them to the 5 Whys, to see where it leads. You can also pair off students and have them try the 5 Whys on each other. It’s fun and interesting (sometimes it leads to new insights, other times to dead ends!). But it also provides a great lesson on the value of using follow-up questions to dig deeper into a challenge.

6) WonderWalls and “Question of the day” bulletin boards

If you’re not doing this already, Question Week is a great time to start creating a space in the classroom to recognize and celebrate great questions asked by students. (Here are some ideas and photos on WonderWalls). I also want to pass along this idea from Megan Strople Daley:

“I’ve heard of teachers using a ‘scholar wall.’ During a lesson if a student asks a question that can’t be answered they write it on a sticky note and put it on the wall. At the end of the day, students can copy the questions and research them at home or during free time. The next days, students present their findings.”

7) Fun with Interviews

I really love this idea shared by teacher Chris Gall.

“I tell my classroom students to ask questions of me for a given length of time (typically 10–15 minutes). Those questions cannot be related to the class, or classroom policies and procedures (we’ll get to those when we talk about the syllabus). I will answer their questions completely honestly, and on the off-chance that they get too personal, I will simply tell them that, rather than making up an answer. But, they are free to pose any question they choose. Their goal is to write a brief biography of me, based on the notes that they take during the Q & A. If kids seem hesitant, or don’t know what types of questions are okay, I give examples (favorite food, siblings, where I grew up, children, etc.) to help them get started. I then collect the writing samples and now have a feel for how my kids write—and they know that it’s okay to ask questions, and that they’ll get honest answers from me (or acknowledgement of ignorance, as the case may be).”

While Gall uses this exercise at the beginning of the term, I think Question Week is also a perfect time to do it—with yourself as the interview subject, or you can bring in special guests to be interviewed!

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Don’t forget to share with others what you're doing on the Question Week Facebook page or at Twitter under the #QuestionWeek hashtag.

 

Thank you, as always, for your interest in beautiful questions, and I hope to continue the conversation with you either via Twitter, Facebook, or on the AMBQ blog.

warren [at] warrenberger.com

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