As our Year 6 students head into their Exhibition inquiries, teachers, mentors and parents are rife with asking and responding to all sorts of questions around their focus issues to become more knowledgeable about it and to be able to inform the community about its importance. Asking great questions and the skill of formulating them is not the exclusive domain of the Year 6 Exhibition students.

Teachers and students across our school strive to formulate the best possible questions to achieve the best possible responses. We strive to move our students beyond the “GoogleAble” question that provides a single correct answer – simple and straightforward. Like PhD students, we encourage all of our students to investigate the issue that is the focus of their units of inquiry and create an answer that synthesises all of their knowledge and understanding – a plausible and accurate response given their learning.

At home we can engage our children in interesting conversations by asking open-ended questions which gets them to do all the hard work by doing all the talking.

How many times have we fallen into that trap of asking “How was school today? What did you do?”.  We want to know, however, these kinds of questions give minimal information. How familiar are the 1 or 2 word responses that really don’t tell us much at all? The children don’t get to do the hard work – parents do because they have to ask all those questions in rapid fire one after the other to get information. And as our children get older the information gets less and less.

Children should be encouraged to ask more questions not fewer. When you ask your child questions, you are modelling what a good question looks like and sounds like. With as much modelling as possible from the home and school environments, children become proficient in asking and responding to questions which increase in difficulty and openness.

But wait a minute – we want the kids to do all the hard work?

What we want to do, as parents, is to have to only ask one or two questions that will have the children talking so much that all we have to do is sit back and listen.

So how can we ask these sorts of questions? Right from the start of schooling at Newington College Lindfield we talk about fat and thin questions with the younger grades and open/challenging and simple/closed questions with the older students. We want our students to create those questions that are unGoogleAble – unable to find the answer easily (if at all) on the Internet or in other resource no matter how hard you look.

Let’s move beyond the basic “How was your day?” and consider these kinds of questions:

• What have your friends been up to?
• What will you look forward to doing tomorrow at school?
• If your favourite stuffed animals could talk, what would it say?
• What made you smile or laugh extra today?
• What do you think you will dream about tonight?
• If you wrote a book, what would it be about?
• (When reading a book together) What character do you enjoy the most?
• What makes your friends so awesome?

There is always the risk of the one-word or short phrase response to some of these kinds of questions. The trick is to follow it up with “Why” or “How” to encourage elaboration and engagement in the conversation.

When asking and responding to questions, the aim is to show your child that you are genuinely interested in what he has to say and not just robotically asking, and, for adults, it’s a great way to exercise our own creativity and imagination.

We are modelling the importance of curiosity.

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” Albert Einstein

Sue Gough – PYP Co-ordinator