How Do Good Students Harness the Power of Questions?

Description

When I was in high school, I had a youth pastor who loved to challenge us students by asking good, tough questions. By studying under him constantly, I picked up on a a mindset that maximizes the value I am able to extract from a teacher’s questions, meaning I learn deeper and pick up on things more quickly. I hope it can help you too.

Text Notes

Wow, even after four recordings, my ideas for the format and look-feel of this project have changed so much. I thought about re-recording the first part of this two part Socratic Method talk, but I think it’s probably okay. This is the one I’m more excited to talk about anyway.

The point of this short discussion is to suggest to you a mindset that you can use to get more out of being a student, which is a skill that all of us should constantly be honing, because we’ll be learning for the rest of our lives.

I don’t in any way mean to say that this is the only way to approach learning. Rather, this is just something I’ve found helps me grasp concepts more quickly and more deeply. In past years, I’ve often been confronted by fellow students about how quickly and easily I seem to pick things up. If you know my academic life, maybe you’ve asked the question too. I’m not saying that this technique is the secret to my success or anyone else’s, but it is something I do regularly and it does help. So let’s jump into it.

Let me tell you the story of when I was sitting in class and my professor asked this really difficult either-or question. The professor looked out in expectation, waiting for a student to respond. All the students kinda looked at each other or looked down, but no one gave an answer. “OK,” the professor said. “Then we’ll put it to the vote. Everyone things it’s option A, raise your hand. Okay, now all for option B.” I looked around, and some students had silently voted with their hands, but more than half the students had abstained from voting altogether. The end.

Maybe you can relate? This happens regularly enough, despite the instructor’s best efforts. My best teachers regularly ask questions that are difficult, provide a few well-defined answer choices, and force me to commit to an answer. And by the way, if this sounds familiar, I talked about the teacher mindset for asking good questions in my very first recording, so check that out if you’d like. The link is on my website blog.joshuakoh.me and will also be in the show notes for this episode.

When my teachers ask me one of those good questions, my most NATURAL inner monologue is something like, “Hm, that seems like a tough 50-50. Or maybe it’s both options? I’m not sure. I don’t want to be the one to speak up and be wrong though.” And apparently, everyone else is thinking the same thing, be cause everyone just sits and stares at the instructor in silence. Or maybe my most natural inner monologue isn’t even that complicated. Sometimes I’m thinking about something completely different to the question or about nothing at all in particular. I’m just waiting it out, for someone else to guess or for the teacher to give the right answer. And my hypothesis that one of these two mindsets held by many of the 100% of students sitting silently while the teacher waits for an answer.

And here’s where I think an opportunity is being missed. There is something better to be actively thinking about that will give a super boost to your ability to learn deep and learn fast.

And that thing is, you must come up with an answer, and you must commit to it. If the teacher is going to provide a good question, then you must respond by selecting a good answer, or at least the best answer you can. Think hard about why one choice might make more sense than the other, given what you’ve just been learning about. You should be able to have some rational reason for coming up with your answer, beyond random guessing or that it hasn’t been Option C in a long time.

And then actively commit to that answer. Speak up and give your best answer to the teacher. Raise your hand when its time to vote and pick just one option. You must come up with an answer, and you must commit to it.

Ok, now the principle is out there, I’ll color in the nuances in a question and answer format.

Question, what if I’m wrong? Answer: Being wrong is okay. Let me define the difference between getting something wrong and failing when it comes to learning. I’m going to say that being “wrong” means you provide the incorrect answer to a question. But “failing” means that you were unable to achieve your goal in the learning session, which should be to learn as much as possible. If that’s not happening, you’re failing in your role, your goal, your duty as a student. Being wrong and failing are two completely different things. Being wrong is okay, failing is the fatal state we’re trying to avoid.

The key to all this is that learning has to be the goal for you personally if this is gonna work. Learning has to have been the goal the whole time. Ask yourself, “What do I really want by sitting in this educational environment?” If you really don’t want to be there, or have been tuned out and in a text conversation instead, or if you’ve been half-asleep the whole time, then this isn’t going to help you. If this is you, you have a different issue related to the definition of your role as a student that needs resolving first.

But some alternate goals can be sneaky but just as damaging. In the face of a tricky question, we all would naturally say, “I don’t want to be the one to speak up and be wrong in front of everyone.” But this reveals something about what you really want by sitting in this educational environment. One of your motivating goals is to appear smart! If instead your goal was to learn and get better, then the possibility of being wrong won’t hinder your willingness to get humble and dig in. The worst outcome would be that you don’t dig in, and then you don’t learn as much. That’s the failure state.

And bear with me a second, I probably stepped on a few toes or emotions by saying that looking bad shouldn’t matter to you, and that’s not my conclusion. I’ll re-address that in a second.

On the other hand, being wrong can actually amplify learning. Remember where you actually had some rationale for why you chose your answer? Now that you’ve been exposed as being wrong, you get to flesh out assumptions that you previously made that in fact aren’t correct. You get to identify where the gaps in your understanding are, which helps point you to good questions to ask back to the teacher, and helps you to identify where you need to study more on your own. If you hadn’t committed to an answer and if you hadn’t been wrong, it is very possible and, and in my experience, common, to hear the teacher eventually give in and provide an answer when no one responds, and the student walks away with their very wrong assumptions never being challenged, and their very real gaps in knowledge never being identified.

Question, what if I’m consistently wrong? Won’t that affect other people’s perception of me? Answer: No, not as much as you might think. I’m not going to say that if your goal is learning, then you should completely ignore how others perceive you when you’re wrong all the time. That would an unnatural and not very human mindset. But think back to the last time one of your classmates answered incorrectly. Or, if nothing comes to mind, be on the lookout next time you’re in an educational setting. When they get something wrong, do you think, “Wow, what a doofus who just can’t shut up about how wrong he is?” No, your mental thought, if you have any at all, is either, “I disagree with that person because I have a different rationale that led me to a different answer,” OR “Hm, I agree with that person because my line of thinking led me to the same answer, so I wonder where we both went wrong?” You being wrong really doesn’t color the opinion of your classmates the way you might feel it does.

And what about the teacher? Well, what do you think the teacher prefers, to ask a question and receive no answer from anyone? Or to receive an answer from a student that’s incorrect? Hey, now’s a chance for you, the listener, to practice this principle. Commit to an answer, which is it? It’s the second, they’d so much rather hear a wrong answer than no answer. With a wrong answer, they can challenge the student’s potentially-flawed assumptions and help guide their thinking away from a flawed line of thinking to a more accurate one. And pay attention, the teacher is not helping just any student to improve by directly speaking into the student’s line of thinking. The teacher is speaking directly into YOUR line of thinking and helping YOU identify your potentially-flawed assumptions and guiding YOUR thinking to be more accurate, because you’re the person that spoke up. That sure sounds like a lot of learning, doesn’t it? And you miss out on all of it if you don’t speak up.

Lastly, being wrong repeatedly gives the teacher more opportunities to interact with you directly, which only strengthens your relationship with the student. Any student committed to learning would rather have a more connected relationship with their teacher than a distant one. The more you get to interface with the teacher directly, the more rapport you build with them, and this is true regardless of whether the way you’re interfacing with them is by providing right answers or wrong ones.

These are the benefits of interacting directly with the teacher. I have a vision where teachers teach and students listen, and then both naturally and comfortably slide into a question-and-answer dialog like it’s a conversation, back and forth. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Question, what if I try but I can’t come up with an answer? Answer: That’s okay! That’s the flip-side of this idea. By thinking deeply about a question, you draw on your knowledge and mental resources. If, doing so, you find that you don’t have the resources to reason out a good answer, then we’ve reached success, the opposite of failure! We’ve learned something! We’ve learned that there’s something we don’t know. And you know what, identifying these gaps in your wall of knowledge and filling them is just as important as laying new bricks. With this newfound learning, you can take down a note to look up something later, like “I couldn’t answer a question about how I would defend my faith in some area. I need to look up some Scripture and maybe look into some books.” Or raise your hand and ask your teacher to fill that gap for you, earning you all the benefits interacting with your teacher. Or best of all, do both!

Question, I’m supposed to come up with and voice an answer, but what if I’m too shy or it’s the wrong situation? Answer: That’s fair, there are situations where speaking up is just not an appealing option. I’ve been asked a question along with the rest of the audience by a panelist speaker in a big conference venue. And I’ve been told to not answer the next question because I attempted to answer the last three. Depending on the context, you may not be able to speak up. And that’s a little unfortunately, because without speaking up, you won’t reap the benefits of dialoging with and building a relationship with the teacher or getting direct feedback on your ideas. But the next best thing is choosing to actively decide on an answer in silence. Then, when another student speaks up or the teacher provides an answer, you can compare your line of thinking to the voiced one. This will help you discover perspectives you didn’t consider, or it will affirm that your line of thinking is consistent with others.

Question, what if my teacher doesn’t ask the good kind of questions where I can commit to an answer? Answer: Instructors need to create an environment where giving a wrong answer is not punished, and communicate that environment to the students. One way I love to see this happen is when the teacher asks a good Socratic question and then says to any student that responds, “How did you get to that answer?” This makes transparent to everyone the line of thinking that resulted in the conclusion being voiced, and it allows the teacher to identify and correct a faulty premise without calling the student as a person wrong. This ends up feeling way better for everyone, since the teacher puts himself on the same side as the students. When that doesn’t happen though, well, I’m not sure. This technique doesn’t really work unless the teacher is at least asking good questions, and hopefully responding well to answers. I’ve yet to figure out how to influence a classroom where that isn’t happening, but let me know if you’ve seen something. Maybe link them to the Socratic Method teacher recording?

So, to wrap up these two recordings. You’ve heard how a Socratic teacher thinks: they want to give you the intuition to think about the problem the same way that they do. You’ve heard what the teacher wants from the student, a committed, selected answer made from a few choices and with intentional decision-making. And you’ve heard one way to maximize the value you can make for yourself as a student, but fulfilling that ask and being the one who picks and commits.

Altogether, these principles give rise to the penultimate place to be as a student, the place that I am personally always working towards in any learning setting. It’s where you can, on your own time, ask yourself the questions that the teacher should be asking. When you learn something new and can recognize a gap in your own understanding, and then ask a question about that gap and filter that gap down to just the realistic options, and then be able to commit to one of those options as making rational sense, man, that’s critical thinking and self-learning at its best. And if you can form the question but don’t know the answer, those are the best questions to ask your teacher.

Finally, let’s practice. Here’s two questions for you. Think back on the key principles in the Socratic Method for the teacher recording and this one. They were:

• The point of the Socratic method, to pass problem solving intuition to the student
• Next, what makes a good Socratic question, that is, they force the student to commit, they’re centered on a core truth, and they make the student dig deeper.
• Lastly, the student mindset, which includes reasoning out the best answer to a question using the resources you have, and either identifying that you don’t have enough resources, in which case you have a good question to ask the teacher out loud, or committing to and voicing your answer, or at least critically comparing your answer with a given answer.

Of these principles, which one are you the most qualified in, do the best? And second, which one do you need to work on the most?

Think about it. Let me know if you want, I’d love to hear. Thanks for listening!