If we want to put questions at the heart of teaching, how do we do that without adding to teacher workload, or opening up the class to the dangers of disruption?

We know that small children ask hundreds of questions a day when they’re little. The number of those questions peak though, at around 288 a day by the time they’re four years old. By Year 5, they are down to about 3-4 questions a day, and by senior school that number gets even lower, as they become increasingly concerned about getting things wrong and looking stupid. 
 
Given that research shows that teachers ask about 400 questions a day, could it be that children’s potential for questioning, for owning and guiding their own learning is being squashed by a teacher’s need to work through the curriculum?
 
The current educational system rewards correct answers rather than encouraging questions. It’s a reflection of society, where we value being expert and ‘right’, and as a culture we don’t like looking like we don’t know something.  Unsurprising then, that teachers are the ones asking all the questions.
 
Given the importance of questioning in developing resilience and independent, critical thinking and decision-making skills however, we need to ask - why isn’t more being done to encourage it?
 
Some teachers believe that student questions can be disruptive or take the class off -topic and that, as a result, they won’t cover all the work that they need to get through.  They want to maintain control of the class and its questions.
 
At the Learn2Think Foundation we are developing a range of methods for teachers to use to get pupils generating their own questions as part of the day-to-day running of lessons. The goal is to ensure that questions aren’t distracting, but rather an integral part of the learning process. A simple, easily integrated step, yet a significant leap in how teachers orchestrate learning.
 
It is a framework to get children asking questions at the beginning, middle and end of topics.  Each topic begins with a question-storm -a take on the traditional brainstorm- in which pupils have a limited amount of time to come up with as many questions as possible. In the research phase of a topic, they get to devise their own questions as jump-off points for research.  At the end they are encouraged to delve deeper, practise critical thinking skills and come up with the creative questions that reveal the fundamentals of the topic.
 
Question-stems or cues are provided to pupils as a prompt to get them into good questioning habits.  The stems take them from simple to complex, moving them from volume generation of simple questions, to making connections and reasoning, through to creative and problem-solving questions.  Games such as Jeopardy and Question-catch make it fun.
 
With this approach, the onus moves from the teacher to the student to do the thinking work of coming up with questions.  The learner gets to play out their own curiosity.
 
A question is a precious thing.  It provides insight into a person  - their concerns, their passions, their dilemmas.  We all need to be allowed to own them, to be comfortable asking them, and to have other people value them.  If we don’t practice this within our educational system, our children will be LESS curious when they leave school than when they joined. 
 
Picasso famously said: “Computers are useless. They can only provide answers”. Let’s not allow the next generation to leave an answer-driven education system incapable of questioning for themselves. They will be unable to solve the problems that the new world throws at them, and any knowledge they do leave school with, may well be made redundant by the likes of Siri and Alexa.

This article first appeared in the January 2019 issue of Education Today. 
www.education-today.co.uk

​This year the Department for Education committed nearly £8m to the Curriculum Fund, to help teachers deliver the more challenging National Curriculum introduced in 2014, while reducing the unnecessary workload burden associated with curriculum planning and resourcing.  A laudable ambition.
 
The pilot programme is focused on three elements: a knowledge-rich curriculum, whole-class teaching and teacher-led instruction. What’s important in the Government’s approach, however, is ensuring that ‘teacher-led’ doesn’t minimise the importance of the need for children to take ownership of their own education. The Montessori approach for example, perhaps the antithesis of ‘teacher-led’ has produced exceptional outliers such as Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It’s important to recognize that there is no ‘one-size fits all’ methodology, so why not make sure we take the very best bits from all approaches?
 
So how do we take useful child-led elements from the likes of Montessori, apply them to existing classroom methods, and not overburden teachers with more work?
 
Best-selling non-fiction author Christopher Lloyd has launched a new initiative to raise awareness of the importance of an interconnected, cross-curricular approach to knowledge and education. He says, “Only by connecting knowledge back together again can children learn to think out of the box, develop critical thinking skills and become their own self-learning systems.”
 
As the Institute of Education’s Ruth Dann says, “Recognition of the importance of curiosity is evident in policy directives and regulatory frameworks governing both the teaching profession and the curriculum”. And now a pilot based on Lloyds latest book Absolutely Everything, the ‘Curiosity Curriculum’, gives pupils the opportunity to develop their own learning journey along a world history timeline that spans 3000 years. As they travel on six subject lines, rather than being told what to learn, students choose from a library of hundreds of Challenges spread across the timeline. The lines intersect, and the pupils must constantly hop between the different subjects in order to progress.
 
Taking another approach, at Learn2Think we are developing a way for pupils to cultivate their critical thinking through questioning skills, whilst working within existing lesson formats. Questioning can be seen as a measure of engagement and of depth of thinking.  By pupils asking the questions they get to own their own ‘knowledge goals’. A. Ram, whose background is in computer science, states: “The ability to ask questions is central to the process of learning, reasoning and understanding,” supporting Choinard’s claim that, “The content of children’s questions parallel their conceptual advances.”   
 
It is telling that levels of questioning fall off from the age of 5, and continue to diminish as children move through the school system. Is this because they’ve just stopped asking questions or because their motivations and engagement have plummeted?
 
Is it because we assume that asking questions is something children are born with, so we don’t need to teach it?  Is it just a thing we do naturally? Does asking questions imply a degree of ‘not knowing’, which pupils are reluctant to admit to? Do teacher’s find the asking of questions disruptive?
 
Learn2Think believe that if teachers are given a framework for question generation at certain points of the lesson, and pupils learn to use questions to further their own learning, questioning can be a powerful tool for teachers to increase levels of engagement whilst still leading the process.
 
And don’t forget, if you want to encourage your children to engage in some questioning, enter your pupils in the Learn2Think Young Journalism Competition, part of Tolerance Day 2018. For more information http://www.toleranceday.org/young-journalist-prize-2018.html
 
Further detail of the Curiosity programme can be found at www.gocuriosity.com

At the Learn2Think Foundation we are heavily focused on the importance of questioning, and how we can embed that within the curriculum. The goal is to encourage the development of curiosity and personal voice in every student. You may ask, why? The reason is that questioning is one of the only ways that we can assess and measure curiosity, and curiosity is one of the most fascinating, and potentially useful, elements of being human.

We all know that curiosity killed the cat, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too eager to encourage it. Yet it’s possible to see that the discouragement of curiosity as a means of preventing people from asking what if? What if the world was more equitable, who gave the authorities the right to tell me how to worship, what happens if everyone votes?

It’s not simply a matter of old phrases, or demands for engagement in the world around us. There is a growing academic body of work which shows that questioning, and curiosity, actually enhances the ability to learn.  Curious students not only ask questions, but also actively seek out the answers. Chip Bruce’s work on the Inquiry Cycle describes learning in terms of a continuous dynamic of ask, investigate, create, discuss and reflect.

Leo Casey has pointed out the importance of questions saying, “Questions are the root of inquiry; they initiate, sustain and invigorate each aspect of the process. Questions direct investigation, drive creativity, stimulate discussion and are the bedrock of reflection. In order to understand inquiry we need to deal with questions.”

Neuroscience is also beginning to reflect the importance of questions. A neurological study in 2014 showed that curiosity makes our brains more receptive to learning, and that as we learn, we enjoy the sensation of learning. Fancy that, encouraging children to enjoy learning!

The researchers found that the more curious we are about a topic, the easier it is to learn information about that topic. Once the subjects' curiosity had been aroused, they were better at learning and remembering completely unrelated information. Dr. Matthias Gruber, of University of California at Davis said, "Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it." 

So if a teacher is able to stimulate students' curiosity about something they're interested in learning about, they'll be better able to learn things that they would normally consider boring or difficult. For example, if a student struggles with mathematics, personalising the topic to match a student’s specific interests,  rather than using generic textbook questions, could help them better remember how to address similar problems in the future.  

As cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham notes, it's the question that stimulates curiosity -- being told the answer stops curiosity in its tracks before it can even get going. That is why the Learn2Think Foundation is researching ways to encourage questioning, to build stronger questions, and to ensure that teachers and students find ways of questioning together. Our first pilot launches in Spring 2019 so drop us a line at contact@learn2think.org.uk if you want to learn more.

Remember as Albert Einstein said, ““I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

​That bullying is a problem in schools is clear. What’s less clear is if current policies and practices are helping to solve that problem. Most schools today have strong anti-bullying policies but there are times when nice words are simply that, words. What matters is the action that is taken to address the problem, and the impact it has on those it involves.
 
The challenge is that a policy is one thing but policies don’t always play out on the ground. What to do when a problem is systematic but treated as an isolated incident? What to do when the situation is he said, she said? What if children are too scared to speak up, or their parents don’t want any trouble? How can you know what actions to take? Are frightened children supposed to become detectives, with schools insisting on ‘proof’ or refusing to listen.
 
While it is vital that children should not be unfairly accused of bullying, it’s equally important that those who have experienced bullying are treated as if that experience matters, and that they are being heard. It can also be challenging when an accusation of bullying is turned around and made issue of race, ability, wealth or any other label. Our children need to be taught that it’s not OK to pass the buck, or assign blame to someone else – they need to learn the importance of taking responsibility for actions and their consequences.
 
Bulllying involves action but it also involves inaction. Who stood up and took a stand, who let bad behaviour go because it wasn’t coming at them? We need to teach children that we can work together to solve problems – and the way in which bullying is handled sends messages to all the children it affects.
 
One of the most potentially damaging issues is perhaps that of defining children as bullies or victims. It’s rare that any situation is ever truly that simple. Those that bully usually have other problems, at home, with self-confidence, with how they have been taught to address problems. Those who are bullied are made to feel helpless and disempowered. Most of all it’s a system which points fingers at individuals, rather than addressing the systemic problems behind the behaviour in the first place. Given what we’re seeing in the US and UK right now, where politics seems to be defined by blaming others, is that a lesson that we want to teach our children?
 
There are other ways in which bullying behaviour can be addressed and one of these is to take the idea of restorative justice and support children in solving their problems themselves. As Jenni Newcombe, founder of The MindTrust says, “The restorative justice idea is quite simple: those who have been harmed are able to convey the impact of harm to those responsible; those responsible acknowledge this impact and then take steps to put it right. This sounds simple. In order to used the methods and skills, it is important for those involved to practice (learn) these and to understand the principals for both prevention and for resolution when conflict results in harm.”
 
The purpose of restorative justice is to provide a practical and effective approach for resolving conflict. It can be used by all members of the school community—it’s not just for children. At the same time, learning the skills and principals of restorative practice are essential tools for life. It is effective in not only helping to mend relationships but also in building respect, improve thinking and problem-solving skills, and to foster effective interpersonal skills. These are all the tools that we should be equipping our children with as human beings, and they should certainly lie at the heart of education.