CriticalThinking.org - The Role of Questions in Teaching, Thinking and Learning - 1 views
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Thinking is not driven by answers but by questions
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every field stays alive only to the extent that fresh questions are generated and taken seriously as the driving force in a process of thinking
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thinking begins with respect to some content only when questions are generated by both teachers and students.
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No questions equals no understanding. Superficial questions equals superficial understanding. Most students typically have no questions. They not only sit in silence, their minds are silent as well. Hence, the questions they do have tend to be superficial and ill-informed. This demonstrates that most of the time they are not thinking through the content they are presumed to be learning. This demonstrates that most of the time they are not learning the content they are presumed to be learning.
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Questions define tasks, express problems and delineate issues. Answers on the other hand, often signal a full stop in thought. Only when an answer generates a further question does thought continue its life as such.
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Feeding students endless content to remember (that is, declarative sentences to remember) is akin to repeatedly stepping on the brakes in a vehicle that is, unfortunately, already at rest. Instead, students need questions to turn on their intellectual engines and they need to generate questions from our questions to get their thinking to go somewhere. Thinking is of no use unless it goes somewhere, and again, the questions we ask determine where our thinking goes.
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It is possible to give students an examination on any subject by just asking them to list all of the questions that they have about a subject, including all questions generated by their first list of questions.
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CriticalThinking.org - The Role of Questions in Teaching, Thinking and Learning
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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?"