- Content Type: Book Chapter
A Teacher's Exercise ~ Five Questions
There is an experiment in child development that I keep coming back to.
Piaget would set out two equal rows and ask the children if they were the same, then spread one row out and ask again. The young ones said the longer row had more. For decades that was read as a fact about children.
Then someone changed one thing. A naughty teddy jumped out of his box and messed up the row by accident, instead of the experimenter deliberately rearranging it. Same children, same age. Correct answers went from 41% to 68%.
The children had known all along.
The question was hiding what they knew.
I want to stay on that, because it goes somewhere. If the answer changes depending on how you asked, the variance was never in them. It was in you. And the only way to ever find that out is to ask more than once, differently — because a single asking gives you a result with nothing to compare it against, and you will read that result as a fact about the student.
There is something else in there too. When the same question is asked twice in the same words, the second asking is itself a message. You are being asked again, so something must have been wrong the first time.
Asking the same way twice applies pressure.
But that doesn't mean that there may be something in asking a question more than once.
The answer: ask important questions several ways and see what comes back. You will be surprised by what can be learned by this exercise.
But if an answer is given between the versions, everything collapses. The second question gets built out of the each answer instead of out of the original question. And the moment answers are involved, it has become a test again — and each new answer takes the chance of going off into a different direction.
So for this to work, we have to encourage that there are no answers in between.
Ask the student to give you the same question in three different forms, or five, and give them nothing between. What comes back isn't three attempts at something. It is one map, made all at once, from the same place.
Here is why it works.
You cannot rephrase what you do not have. To say a thing another way you have to know what the question is about rather than what it says — you have to go underneath the sentence and come back up somewhere else. Someone holding only the sentence will swap words and produce four sentences that are the same sentence wearing different clothes. Someone who has been underneath produces versions that come from different directions.
So the teacher is not reading whether the versions are good. They are reading the connections, what the student understands, and the spread.
If the questions circle only one small point it means the concept is sitting in there as one undifferentiated lump. That is information, not failure, and I want to say that plainly because it would be easy to read it as a student falling short. It isn't. It tells you where to go next, which is more than any answer would have told you.
Three to five questions that reach in different directions means the student has hold of something they can turn over in their hands.
And then there is the thing it is easy to miss.
A student can carry a wrong meaning for a word for years and nothing will expose it. They hear forward and understand fast. They hear soft and understand loose. They hear volume and understand loud, or big, or nothing at all. As long as they only ever receive the word, the substitution stays invisible — they nod, they answer, and sometimes the answer even comes out right, because a wrong definition can produce a correct answer by accident often enough to stay hidden for years.
But ask them to say the question in their own words, three different ways, and they have to put your word down and reach for theirs.
The substitute comes out. Every version they give about forward comes out about speed, and there it is, on the page, where both of you can read it.
Something that neither of you could never have found out from a single answer.
And we have to realize that an answer can be right for the wrong reason. And a wrong answer tells you something is off, but never which thing.
There is one more thing this does, and it may be the best of it.
A question asked several ways often answers itself.
Not because anyone answered it. Because in the asking for 5 questions on the same thing makes the student look from new directions. And if we are lucky the student sees the answer through the exercise, and the teacher never had to say anything. That by asking for five questions we gave direction that will end up coming from themselves.
Nobody had to be told anything. The answer wasn't withheld and then released — it was never handed over at all. It was already inside the question, and the student only had to look at it from enough sides for it to become visible. Which means what they walk away with is not an answer they were given. It is an answer they found.
Those do not sit the same way in a person.
Some notes in the using of it.
It does not have to be five. Sometimes three is enough, as long as every one of them is a true question. Students will learn to perform variety if this becomes routine — producing the required number as a trick, with the underneath skipped. Watch for that, and correct it quietly, without turning it into a moment. And use this sparingly. It stops working when it becomes the thing you always do.
Space them, too. Three versions in three minutes is an interrogation, and by the third the student is answering to make it end. It is a different animal over a longer stretch.
And be careful of the version of this that goes wrong: asking until one of the versions produces the answer you were hoping for. That is not finding out what they know. That is leading. The honest form of this has to allow all three to come back through them and that is when it means something.
The hardest part is what the teacher does with the map once they have it.
Possibly nothing. Because the moment you point at version three and say there — that is where you have forward wrong, it has turned back into a test, and the next set will be written for you instead of for themselves.
From the very beginning of Kjrsos we addressed how questions have power, in the book So That We Can See.
"It is time to discover how questions live within answers waiting to be found, and not the other way around."
What I did not see until now is that this exercise is the same thing approached from the other end. The book says the questions are inside the answers. A question asked three ways says the answer was inside the question.
Same relationship, walked backwards. Which is what you would expect, if the thing is actually true.
And it gives something back that was taken from most of us early. Our schools stuff the final answers in as fast as they can and punish the incorrect one, and there is no surer way to kill the joy of learning, the joy of questions. This exercise has no answer in it and no wrong version. There is nothing here to get incorrect. For a student who learned at six that a question is a thing you get graded on, this may be the first one they have been handed since with no trap in it.
Watch, too, what it does to the one teaching.
You are not answering. You are watching. You do not have to announce that you are not the authority in the room — which never really works anyway, and mostly makes people uncomfortable. For the length of this, you simply are not operating as one, and the student feels the difference without ever being told.
Kjrsos Is... Finding the answer that was inside the question all along.
