Who is or was your most effective teacher? What was it about that person that inspired your learning?
When are you most likely to learn? How did you learn when you were a child? Do you still ask questions like you did when you were a child?
Do you notice a pattern in this blog? Have I made any declaratory statements?
Are you a trainer? How do you spark inquiry in others? How do you help your students, participants, employees or team members elevate their critical thinking? Do you use questions? How do you incorporate them? What is the ratio of telling versus asking in your training program? What if you had to design an entire training curriculum using nothing but questions? Could you do it? Would it be effective? How might you incorporate new information or knowledge using only questions?
Would you be surprised to learn that the greatest tool most certified coaches acquire during our training is the use of the question? Can you imagine why?
Are you still following the pattern of this blog? Are you thinking yet? Are you starting to formulate some questions of your own? May I challenge you with some question exercises you can play with right now, to illustrate the effectiveness of asking as a training technique? Are you ready?
For starters, what questions would you ask next if you were writing this blog? How might you respond to the blog using only questions?
Next, how does this blog make you feel? Frustrated? Inspired? Confused? Why do you think the blog makes you feel that way? How might you ensure that you proactively gain value from it?
Next, how would you improve on this blog? What about this blog is not effective? Why? What about this blog is effective? Why?
Next, how many questions does your most recent or current training program pose for its students? How many of them are truly open-ended questions, prompting critical thinking on the part of the participant? Why do you think most trainers neglect the use of the question, outside of assessments? Can you discern the difference between a test question and a learning question? How is each used effectively?
Have you ever seen or played the game “Questions Only,” where two or more people must converse using only questions? Was it difficult? Why do you think we have such a hard time formulating questions? What do you think would happen to our learning experiences if we had to go an entire day speaking in questions only? What if the questions we posed were based in true curiosity rather than merely forming interrogative sentences? What might we learn? What would you want to learn about? Whom would you ask? How would you document your learning? How would you apply it?
Why do you think questions are effective learning mechanisms?
Finally, what will you do as a result of reading this article? Are you willing to pause right now to answer that question for yourself? Can you imagine something cool happening as a result? When will you implement your action? Are you willing to share stories with me?
