TEDxSomerville - Dan Rothstein: Did Socrates Get it Wrong?

did Socrates get it right 2,500 years ago I think so he was making an argument about the importance of asking questions all of you probably have had this experience where you've been in a doctor's office and maybe you didn't you presented some information even quite know what to ask anybody ever had that experience does it ever feels something like this how about if 30 minutes afterwards you're on your way home and then you realize oh that's what I need to ask does it feel like that now I'm sure nobody here has ever been in a meeting where a question has come up and you spent two hours discussing and deliberating the question and after two hours your eyes that's the wrong question we just wasted two hours right does it feel something like this how about if that first question that came up in two months was assigned to a committee a committee work two months on it and after two months does this does this next image feel like that sorry there is no image that can capture that all right so our understanding what we have seen is that asking questions is the single most powerful renewable source of intellectual energy it's in our minds we can create it we can create it continuously we need to develop the muscle let's travel from Athens 2500 years ago to Lawrence Massachusetts 20 20 years ago 1990 lue Santana and I and colleagues were working with low-income parents who weren't participating in the children's education we were working on a dropout prevention program and the parents said well we don't go to the schools we don't participate because we don't even know what to ask so we were quick only took us one or two thousand times of hearing that as well maybe there's something there and of course we did the wrong thing we gave them a list of questions and then only produce greater dependency so what we realized was that this is a skill that needs to be developed we wondered why is it that adults get to where they are and they're not able to ask their own questions so we looked at skills that are taught in school we looked at reading and you can see kind of a gradual upward slope to at the age of eight eighteen seventy percent of students have basic reading skills now look at the next skill writing pretty much the same upward slope now take a look at this one asking questions okay so there's a problem and if you doubt that information just ask the parent of a four-year-old who's at the top of the slope and ask a teacher of an eighteen year old and if there's further doubt you can reference a New York Times article when they ask college presidents what should a student know after four years of college and Leon Botstein said a student should know how to frame a question Nancy Cantor said the best we can do for students is have them ask the right questions we need to deliberately teach the skill of question asking there's enormous potential to that what we have seen in our work is people learning to ask questions and effecting transformational change we've seen sugarcane plantation workers in Hawaii who are about to lose their livelihood not able to affect a corporate board decision but able to ask questions about how the land was going to be used how company owned housing was going to be allocated what kind of job training alternatives there were there was a range of things that they really do Mexican immigrant parents and in Mexico concerned about violence prevention they were able to focus on how to get programs for their students how to get transportation for their children to be able to participate in programs that would keep them out of trouble we saw patients and community health centers in the Bronx and Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn learning how to ask their own questions participating in their health care in ways that their doctors had never seen before and it all came from learning to ask questions so I'm gonna actually share with you in a very quick way and I'm going to ask you to participate in an exercise using the question formulation technique that we developed you're gonna be able to do this right now with me and I'm gonna share with you also an example of a group that has gone through the process with some examples of their questions so first I'm gonna start off with a question focus which is basically what's going to be you're going to be focusing on when you're asking your questions and there are four rules in order to produce your own questions ask as many questions as you can do not stop to answer judge or discuss the questions write down every question exactly as it's stated and change any statements into questions would there be any difficulty in following these rules would you have trouble with any one of the rules any one of them in particular might be difficult for you number three number two number one right it's very interesting because it actually requires using the rules to change some of our habits of mind our practices in being able to generate questions so now let's go to the question focus key obstacles to my learning at TEDx Somerville today what are some questions that come up I'm sharing my precious seconds with you I need you working on with me on this yes don't know what's gonna happen thank you what would be some challenges okay so let's just think about this this the key obstacles to my learning at TEDx today and we've heard some example those questions now I'm going to share with you examples from a group that went through this am I paying enough attention what could I do to overcome these obstacles what are those obstacles do all speakers interest me is the current speaker boring me mm-hmm will help me if I take notes do I miss anything by tweeting does tweeting help me pay attention will I be able to remember key points from each Tom what should I be focusing on and why did I sit behind this tall guy okay so let's go to look at questions in a different way let's look at open and close ended questions closing the questions require a simple yes or no open-ended questions require more explanation so look at this this example here will I be able to remember key points from each talk think about a quick way that you could change that to an open-ended question what key points will I be able to remember from each talk how thank you okay so let's look at what this this group came up with they talked about what will help me remember key points from each Tom now very often we think that it's always important to go from closed-ended to open-ended but there's real value to also being able to go from open to close let's take that example of why did I sit behind this tall guy check this close into question okay is that seat in front of him still available something worth being able to articulate very clearly and very quickly okay now let's move to a next step prioritization prioritizing your questions think about the questions that you saw up here the questions that you thought about think about if there are ones that leap out at you as a particularly important question that you want to think about so do a little bit of thinking on prioritization just for a couple seconds now what was a question that you saw up here or you thought about that was particularly important looking again at key obstacles to my learning at TEDx today they chose what are those obstacles which is actually beginning to name the problem what should I be focusing on which is transition to look at what can I do to address it and then they actually took the one that they changed from clothes to open and I asked what will help me remember key points from each talk which allows them to really focus on specific steps that they can take ok so what do you do learn you just produce questions you saw a process for changing questions and prioritizing questions more questions are better Thank You presupposing positive outcomes okay so this is what this group came up with that's spending time on questions at first felt like a detour to spend time on just questions but it turned out to be a shortcut going from an overwhelming problem or something they're not clear how to think about to being able to come up with specific action steps and was all done by asking questions so how did you learn what you learn this is a question that we always ask you engagement thank you so so what you see here is that people talk about that what they did when they learned this when they were did the learning when they figured things out when they began to problem-solve they did it by asking questions by being engaged by figuring things out themselves but by using a structured and a rigorous process for doing that but again eliminates some of those to our meetings and finding the wrong question so what we've learned from teachers who are using this in the classroom across the country and now around the world is that when they teach their students how to ask their own questions they feel that they are doing far more effective teaching and there's much deeper learning among the students this is what a student said in a summer remedial program in Boston who is about to be held back for a year but spent a summer in a program and as part of the curriculum the teacher did superb work teaching the students how to ask their own questions one young man said at the end how he felt he said I felt smart and a second second student young woman said I'm getting good at this question thing it makes me feel smart which it probably is an adjective they had never used before to describe their experiences in school and then 3,000 miles away in Palo Alto at a public school where there are children of Stanford faculty and software engineers this is what a student said using the same process just when you think you know all you need to know you asked another question and discover how much more there is to learn so why does this process for asking questions work in so many different environments and this is what we figured out after we spent time and learning from teachers and observing classrooms and thinking about it some more realize that there are three thinking abilities that are developed divergent thinking the rules for producing questions allow you to go off in many different directions then there's convergent thinking when you begin to think about different kinds of questions you begin to analyze synthesize strategize and prioritize you begin to think about your use of questions what you want to find out and then there's another piece metacognitive thinking and this is an often overlooked but very powerful thinking ability in which you're able to do some thinking about your thinking so at different points I asked you what might be difficult about the following the rules about think about the advantages and disadvantages of open and closed ended questions about prioritization of your questions what you learn how you learned encouraging people to think about what they were thinking so you just produce a lot of questions there's all about you and in our work about people asking their own questions so did Socrates get it wrong well Socrates got it right about the importance of questions but the Socratic method very often depends upon a wise person at the front of the room leading the less wise no no no nothing personal here okay it's not about you of me leading the less wise through a process in which they learn by from the questions being asked by the wise person at the front so part of what we've been trying to look at is how do you build people's capacity to do this thinking for themselves so what happens if we don't ask our own questions think about that think about that if we're always dependent on others to be asking questions for us so let's return to Lawrence and the with the parents they're offered us they named the obstacle to their participation but as we spent more time on it we realized that they also named an obstacle to learning an obstacle to creativity and an obstacle to change but by naming the problem so clearly in ways that very few people have done they also identified the solution questions are a renewable source of intellectual energy the potential is there all the time if we want to use that renewable energy to improve education for all students to promote a creative economy and to build the stronger democracy what obstacles do we have to overcome thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 40,705

Rating: 4.75 out of 5

Keywords: Right Question Institute, ted talks, ted, Dan Rothstein, tedx, USA, tedx talk, Socrates, Social Change, ted talk, TEDxSomerville, tedx talks, Education, ted x, Psychology, English, Questions

Id: _JdczdsYBNA

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Sat May 19 2012