The right answer is a red herring

Ask a question in a typical fourth-grade classroom, and hands fly up immediately.

A question is often an opportunity to demonstrate what you know, and ten-year-olds love to do that.

But questions can serve a deeper purpose in education: They stimulate thinking.

And for a student trained to answer quickly and automatically like they’re hitting the buzzer on a game show, a question designed to stimulate thinking can be confusing or even upsetting.

Instead of being invited to show off their knowledge, they’re being asked to do the opposite: To ponder a question they don’t already know the answer to.

If you’ve absorbed the message that the fastest kids are the smartest, having to take time to think makes you feel dumb. Not having the answer makes you feel dumb. And yet, thinking deeply and being exposed to new ideas is actually what makes you smarter.

To teach kids to think, we’ve got to give them questions they don’t automatically know the answers to — juicy questions that lead to more questions. And we, the adults, need to be willing to play this game, too.

For example, we might ask, “Why does the heart pump blood?” This is the kind of question that everyone assumes they know the answer to, but it might actually require some thinking to get beyond, “So the blood can circulate.”

A good question is like a puzzle waiting to be solved, the setup of a joke, or an unread novel. The right answer is beside the point. Like the solution to the puzzle, the punchline of the joke, or the climax of the novel, the right answer is deeply satisfying if you’ve earned it, but doesn’t mean much if you haven’t.

That’s not how it seems to the kid who is desperately making random guesses in order to avoid the discomfort of thinking. But to grow, we have to wean kids (and ourselves) away from the addiction to the right answer. Nobody gets to be the know-it-all, not even the grownups. We all have to practice asking questions with many possible answers and pondering problems with no apparent solution. It takes practice — and it’s okay to struggle and get it wrong.

How might asking better questions change the world?