Take-Home Lessons: Questions & Answers

Key to the success of a YCISL workshop is to sustain conversation and thought exchange so that there is dynamic learning. Our workshops are designed to be interactive with the goal of participants deriving useful take-home lessons. Fundamentally, we can set rhythm using questions and provide tonal variety with answers. We also know that students are already quite good at providing answers (after all that is what schools teach), so our main task will be to get them as skilled at providing questions. We can thus teach by setting good examples, and prompting questions. We can also examine how one interprets questions and synthesize an answer – through both convergent and divergent thinking.

The title to this take-home lesson may be: Lead with Questions. Give your best answer.

So why develop questioning skills? The obvious answer is that the most efficient ways to fill in knowledge gaps is to ask questions, collect the answers, and apply to the gaps as needed. One would also use questions to set scopes and frameworks when brainstorming and problem-solving. Questions are critical for problems for which are not fully defined – where data is needed or can never be properly known. Questions are needed for due diligence as well as definition and clarity.

Extra dimensions we can summon – that students would be not well acquainted with – include (a) encouraging a series of questions (perhaps well-sequenced) that coherently pursue a point [maybe 20 questions?], and (b) questioning the ideas of others (especially authority).

Perhaps we can create a Question game?