How to teach your students to ask great questions

Great educators have always valued great questions, and as AI-driven technologies become better at providing answers, teaching your students to ask great questions seems more important than ever. But how do you teach someone to ask great questions?

Having spent decades as a philosopher researching the nature and impact of questions, I have been asked this question a thousand times. Unfortunately, my answer usually disappoints: Asking questions is not something we can, or should, teach.

To quote German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, “there is no such thing as a method for learning how to ask questions.” Erwin W. Straus said the same thing; “the act of questioning cannot be taught”, and then he added: “Nor does it require a teacher.”

I can imagine how frustrating this point of view must be to you as an educator. If a skill that is more important than ever, can neither be taught nor requires a teacher, then what on earth are you supposed to do? Wait for your students to figure out how to ask great questions themselves? Live with their bad - or lack of - questions until they do?

No, fortunately there are lots of things you can do to help your students ask great questions: You can make room for them to be curious. You can invite them to explore the topics you are teaching from different perspectives. You can create an environment where it is easy for students to express their doubts and uncertainties. You can encourage them to experiment with what they know - and don’t know.

The point is not that we should give up on great questions. Instead it’s important to remember that when it comes to asking questions, we need neither special methods nor teachers, because as human beings, we already know how to do it. As Straus put it; “we are able to ask questions because we are questioning beings at our very core”. 

So what you can do to help your students ask great questions, is to make it easy for them to practice. They already have the skill, so now your job is to create conditions where they can continue to apply and develop their innately human curiosity.

- This post was written by Pia Lauritzen, PhD who is a founding board member of the Question Collective.