Keep the Questions Coming

I go to church downtown, so I park my car in a deck and then walk a block to the church.  Between the parking deck and the church building is a Marbles Children's Museum, and Sunday is a big day for them.  As a result, I see a lot of families with young children.  

This week, a family was slowly making its way down the stairs because their son (who appeared to be three or four) had short legs, and stairs are made for taller people.  He looked up at his dad and said, "Why are stairs hard?"  In the half block I walked behind them, I saw him point to a tree and say, "What kind of tree is that?"  He put his hand on a public scooter and said, "Is this the motor?"  He looked down at the gutter as he stepped off the cure and said, "Where did all the leaves come from?" and "What's that thing?" (There was a piece of metal in the pile of leaves, and I don't know what it was either.)  He pointed to a parked bike and said, "What kind of bike is that?"  He pointed at a helium tank and said, "How is there a gas station on the sidewalk?"  

This kid is my people.  

He's clearly part of a family that values his questions because his dad answered them all, even explaining the difference between the helium tank and "a gas station."  His older sister wasn't asking a million questions, but she didn't seem to think it was odd.  She just happily skipped in front of them.  Little kids want to understand the world, and they ask a ton of questions because they have no self-consciousness about not knowing.  

Most people as fewer questions as they get older (those of us that don't become science teachers), and there are a few reasons for that.

• We have answers to the most common questions, so we don't have to point to things on the street and ask about them.
• We have some prior knowledge about more things, so we can do a lot of asking and speculating inside our own minds, leading to asking fewer questions out loud.
• We stop caring about things that don't impact our wallets.  This one makes me the saddest, and you know it has happened when students start asking about when they will use something in real life.  We didn't care about that when we were young, and it only changed because an adult told us it should.
• We start to feel insecure about what we don't know.  This four-year-old didn't think he should already know the answers to the questions he was asking, so he had no fear in asking them.  As we get older, we're afraid we'll look dumb if we ask a question because we assume our peers already know the answer.
• We stop thinking of pure curiosity as a virtue.

Teachers, we can't control all of these factors, but we do have some level of control over our classroom environment.  

• The first and most important thing we can do is model our own curiosity.  When you wonder about something, wonder aloud.  Ask your students; they will love it if they know the answer to something you don't.  When they see adults being curious about something just out of interest, not because it makes them better at their job or makes them more money, it can keep them engaged in asking questions.  
• Help them to recognize that there are deeper questions to be asked about everything.  Just because a student has the answer to a surface-level question doesn't mean there is nothing more to be asked.  When I ask a question, so students like to give them the most basic and accessible answer possible.  My most frequent follow-up is, "So then how does that happen?"  They need to know that saying "A plant makes energy through photosynthesis" isn't the end of the story.  There are between 3 and 300 more questions to be explored beyond that level.
• Make it okay to "ask a stupid question."  Please don't tell them there is no such thing as a stupid question; it's just untrue.  However, there is nothing wrong with asking about something you do not know.  When other students react badly, point out that we all have things we don't know and that the only way to find out is to ask.  (Again, if you have modeled this in your own life, the atmosphere of your classroom will be different.  My middle school history teacher, Mr. Watkins, used to talk about things from the Mini-Page, a weekly insert in our local newspaper aimed at children.  When someone in our class asked why he would read the Mini-Page, he said, "because there are things in it that I didn't know before.")
• Explicitly state that curiosity matters.  I've always been curious, but perhaps the most important thing my 9th-grade science teacher, Mr. Sandberg ever said to me was, "This curiosity you have is an important part of you."  He made it clear that it wasn't just a good thing or a fun thing, but it was an important thing.  The fact that he said to me in the 9th grade mattered a lot because that is the time when the utilitarian shift tends to happen.

Ask questions.  Answer questions.  Respect questions.  Love questions.  Do whatever you can to keep the questions coming.