Purpose: To help participants overcome the fear of speaking up and perhaps looking foolish in class.

 Time Required: 15 minutes.

 Size of Group: 8 to 10.

 Materials Required: None.

 The Exercise in Action: Every trainer has repeated the classroom cliché, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” But the simple fact is some participants are reluctant to ask questions for fear of sounding foolish, and that can lead to a serious lack of interaction in a session.

To get participants over that hump at the outset of a course, Darren Patton reads aloud a list of some of the silliest, most irrelevant questions he’s ever had to answer in a corporate classroom. Examples include, “What color were the walls in this room before they painted them blue?” and “How many vacation days do you get per year?”

Once the list is read, Patton, a trainer with The Vanguard Group, Wayne, PA, asks small groups to have some fun and come up with a single bizarre question to share with the large group. The query judged most irrelevant by the entire class wins that group a small prize.

“After a few laughs, people start realizing that nothing they ask can be as silly or irrelevant as the previous questions,” Patton says. “That tends to make the class more comfortable with voicing questions later in the session.”