"The best you can hope to have is a good compass to guide you. The ones who understand that -- and can embrace that -- are going to have the greatest adventures"
- Jacqueline Novogratz
.
.
.
Questioning is one of the most important parts of our lives, yet we seem to ask questions less and less as we grow older. I recently read the book A More Beautiful Question, by Warren Berger, and learned all about asking "beautiful questions". In the introduction of the book, Berger states that the average four-year-old British girl asks her mother 390 questions a day (Berger, 2014). He goes on to say that we come out of the womb questioning the world around us, and that questioning, for the young, is like breathing, it's an accepted and essential part of life (Berger, 2014). As an educator, I have experienced these many questions from students, and understand that questioning can be like breathing for our young children. But here is the problem: "for the rest of her life, that four-year-old girl will never ask questions as instinctively, as imaginatively, or as freely as she does at that shinning moment" (Berger, 2014). As we grow older, questioning becomes something less accepted in our society. We begin to become annoyed with those many questions, we begin to answer with a simple "because" and we begin to show our children, maybe inadvertently, that questioning is not only unimportant, but unaccepted.
As we grow older, the constant questioning seems to minimize more and more. Asking "Why?" is to "risk being seen as uniformed, or possibly insubordinate, or maybe both" in both life and in the workspace (Berger, 2014). Yet, Berger argues that those who question in the workspace tend to be most successful. Success begins with asking questions and ends with asking even more questions. Berger says that for some of those who are most successful, "their breakthrough inventions, hot start-up companies, the radical solutions they'd found to stubborn problems -- could be traced to a question (or a series of questions) they'd formulated and then answered" (Berger, 2014).
So, what does this mean for the classroom? This shows us that we need to cultivate inquiry in the classroom, encourage our young minds to never stop questioning, and always accept the never-ending (and possibly annoying) questions that we receive. We need to foster an environment where asking questions, any and all questions, is encouraged in the classroom and students feel safe and welcome to ask questions.
References
Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question: the power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas (First U.S. edition.). Bloomsbury.
Comments