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ERIC Number: EJ929965
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010
Pages: 8
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0748-8475
EISSN: N/A
Teaching Students to Ask Questions Instead of Answering Them
Bowker, Matthew H.
Thought & Action, p127-134 Fall 2010
Philosophers, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists have argued convincingly that the act of questioning is central to thinking, to storing and communicating knowledge, even to several important types of social interaction. But while scholars of higher education have written extensively on the topic of questioning for more than a century, they have focused on how teachers ask questions and how students answer them, largely neglecting to consider that helping students develop their own questioning skills might be a valuable pedagogical objective in itself. In his teaching, the author practices a question-centered pedagogy that is different from the Socratic, critical, and problem-based approaches found in many college courses. He has found that requiring students to create their own questions about course material helps them understand how the answers they have come to accept are connected, contingent, and contextual, how they rely on, imply, and beg additional questions. In this question-centered pedagogy, the questions themselves are the answers. (Contains 8 endnotes.)
National Education Association. 1201 16th Street NW Washington, DC 20036. Tel: 202-833-4000; Fax: 202-822-7974; Web site: http://www.nea.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A