Intellectual development, however, can be an intra- as well as an inter-personal
phenomenon. That is, learning may not come directly from teachers but rather
from their absent or invisible presence. Online pedagogues, therefore, can be
present in different ways. They may be present in person, participating in learning
conversations. They may constitute an absent presence that, nonetheless, is
embodied in the learning resources directed towards students (e.g., the selected
readings or activities). Or pedagogues may exist merely as inner voices, inherited
from the language of others, that (invisibly) steer the desires, self-regulation,
and self-direction of learners. Indeed, this last pedagogic position ‘auto-didacticism,’
has always been central to the post-Enlightenment ideals of liberal adult education.
CriticalThinking.org - The Role of Questions in Teaching, Thinking and Learning
One of the reasons that instructors tend to overemphasize "coverage" over "engaged thinking" is that they assume that answers can be taught separate from questions. Indeed, so buried are questions in established instruction that the fact that all assertions - all statements that this or that is so - are implicit answers to questions is virtually never recognized. For example, the statement that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade is an answer to the question "At what temperature centigrade does water boil?"
