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Field Study Learning Experience: Outcome - Based

This document discusses the importance and impact of questions in learning experiences. It states that well-timed, precise questions keep learners actively engaged in thinking about content and exploring their own understanding rather than just answering questions. In contrast, poorly worded questions can distract and frustrate learners. The document advocates reducing topics to a series of thoughtful questions rather than statements in order to encourage deeper analysis and the emergence of new questions. When asking questions, educators should focus on crafting questions that are clear, targeted, and stimulate further reflection and discussion.

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28 views

Field Study Learning Experience: Outcome - Based

This document discusses the importance and impact of questions in learning experiences. It states that well-timed, precise questions keep learners actively engaged in thinking about content and exploring their own understanding rather than just answering questions. In contrast, poorly worded questions can distract and frustrate learners. The document advocates reducing topics to a series of thoughtful questions rather than statements in order to encourage deeper analysis and the emergence of new questions. When asking questions, educators should focus on crafting questions that are clear, targeted, and stimulate further reflection and discussion.

Uploaded by

gracia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Outcome – Based

Field Study
Learning Experience
5

Question
- A sentence worded
or expressed so as to
elicit information.
The Abstraction of the Question

The right question at the right time can make a learning experience,
because more than anything read, drawn, or even written, a question is acute
and properly troubling. It creates a needle-point of light even as it suggests darkness.
Even if it’s multi-part and inclusive, it’s somehow singular. It jabs and fingers
at a learner’s mind, then burrows in like a drill.
A bad question is sloppy—it doesn’t burrow anywhere, but bangs around
and makes a troubling noise. It forces the learner to come to the question and
frown and decode. Decoding can be cognitively demanding and thus helpful,
but not if it mars the student’s thinking.
A precise, well-timed question keeps the learner in the content, in their own mind, in
the mind of model thinking—in the mind of the clock-maker and not the question-maker.
A bad question also creates the illusion of an end-point to thinking—of the student having
arrived at some place where they understand the mind of the clock-maker. And when that
happens, everything just kind of dissolves, and they sit passively and wait for another
question, thinking they’ve won.
This, of course, is tragedy. The mind must never exhale, but grapple! Wrestle with a
text, a concept, or a question until they’ve found a new question is better suited to the task.
Taking a piece of literature, an engineering problem, or an ethical issue and reducing it to a
series of question is a dangerous kind of reductionism.
Questions are links to other questions, and that’s it. Little fragments of curiosity that
get at the marrow of important issues that resonate and thrum and linger. Statements of
opinion, answers, and other lies are fine, provided they move aside to let the questions
through.
When you ask questions—on exams, in person, in your next Socratic discussion—
insist on good questions. Great questions. Model their development. Revise their wording.
Toy with their tone. Simplify their syntax or implications over and over again until the
confusion has been bleached and there’s only thinking left.
Until the question asks exactly what it should, and nothing more.

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