10 Dealing With Questions and Dishing Out Answers

Tinkering generates questions, and as the facilitator, you’ll be looked to for answers. Relax: you don’t need all the answers, and in fact, it is much more important to have the right approach to dealing with questions than an inventory of all the answers you may be called on to provide.

Questions

Questions are the basis of learning. It seems to me extremely difficult to learn something meaningful without having a question about it first.¹ Tinkering is valuable in the learning process precisely because it raises real, relevant questions.

If you’re a teacher like me, more than once you’ve been in a dreary classroom trying to convey some content to your charges and failing magnificently to make it come alive for them, when suddenly, in response to some unseen cosmic kick, one of them scratches his head, puts up his hand, and asks a pointed question. The room comes alive. Other students join in with tentative answers and additional questions, challenges are offered and countered, and education takes off out of the rut, pedal to the metal, accelerating into the wild blue yonder.

I even said to myself a few times after such occasions in my early teaching career, “Is there any way I could plant a question like that? Maybe bribe a student ahead of time?” I thought it surely possible to make this happen on demand; it’s so good!

It turns out that tinkering is a quite reliable way to raise those questions. If, for instance, you tell a student that force equals mass times acceleration, she is left with few choices as to her response: accept it as truth, reject it as a lie, or ask you to explain or prove it. If, on the other hand, she has just designed and built a catapult, the questions will rain down like a hail of arrows from the castle turrets: Will a heavier or lighter rock go farther? Will a change in elastic make it go farther? What is the best launch angle? Is there an optimal force, or is more always better? Can you correlate force with distance? What is the limit to scaling up a siege engine? What was used as elastic a thousand years ago? Is there a way to power it with just gravity? What are the key factors to making it throw far? Why does that group’s catapult work better than ours?

These are all questions that will set students to learning. Each one can be explored, and some answers can be arrived at using nothing more than the materials on hand. At the same time, answers are not important just yet.

The value of the student’s question is supreme. The best initial response to a question is not to answer it, per se, but to validate it, protect it, support it, and make a space for it. Like a blossom just emerging, a question is vulnerable and delicate. A direct answer can extinguish a question if you’re not careful. But if you nourish the blossom, it will grow and give fruit in the form of insight as well as more questions.

In short, a question needs to be nurtured more than answered. It should be given center stage, admired, relished, embraced, and sustained.

Practically speaking, here are some strategies my staff and I use to nurture questions that arise in our Workshop:

• Commend and praise the question. I’m not a believer in praising the student, but to praise a question is to show others what is valuable. Don’t be afraid to shout it out. In fact the answer that is always right, always good, and always ready is: “Yeah!” And then repeat the question with a huge smile.

Student: “Why does the sound from the drum change when I hit it with a different stick?”

You: “Yeah! (grinning) Why does it change with different sticks? Excellent question; what do you think?”

• Restate the question. There are no stupid questions, but there are “wrong” questions. By this I mean that what students really want to ask is not what they are asking. If you restate and slightly realign the question, they may be even more pleased with it.

Student: “Why does the sound get higher as the drum’s head gets stiffer?”

You: “Yeah! Why does the pitch of the sound go up when you tighten the drum head?”

• If a certain question arises that is key to getting at an understanding of the concept, or if a question has really gripped a student or group, write it on the board. You can even collect all questions on the board after spending a certain time tinkering. This demonstrates to all the value of forming questions, and everyone gets to benefit from the questions of others.

One category of especially valuable questions is comprised of those that, with a smidgen of guidance, allow your students to definitively work out their answers on the spot, in the course of a few minutes, with the materials and instruments on hand. When this sort of question pops up, it’s all I can do to keep from salivating and telling them, like some kind of pusher in a dark alley: “You, lucky ones, are about to learn something from your question, straight from the stuff on this table that you’ve been tinkering around with, and in doing so you will largely bypass myself and all other authorities. You will make a dynamic and dramatic learning advance that will serve as a model for infinite future possibilities in your lifelong quest to understand! Hold on, here it comes!”

Know that the best questions, the stimulating and driving questions, the roots of learning questions, are not your questions but rather the students’. Many teachers have recognized the value of questions, and have replaced their lectures with a series of questions. Unfortunately, this can have the dour effect of turning the class into a never-ending quiz. Many students are heavily conditioned from years of practice to try and please the teacher by thrashing and grabbing for the “right” answer, so even the best of the teachers’ questions can easily turn into a trivial guessing game. Sometimes even when I’m rephrasing and restating a student’s question, she’ll take a wild stab at the answer, thus trivializing the moment and snipping off the tender shoot. This is a real danger.

When we have questions that we hope the students will make their own, rich questions that we know will lead to deeper understanding, we have to be clever. Just as with the toddler who will embrace his own decision and reject yours, it is often best to arrange the situation so that the students stumble right into your question. The more times you can repeat a tinkering activity, the better you’ll get at setting these delectable traps for your students.

This is in no way underhanded, and you needn’t be dishonest in your response. Good gurus have been doing this for millennia. For example, if you make the model of a simple circuit such that two of the bare wires are likely to cross, when students begin constructing their own circuits, some will inevitably cross the wires, leading to a short circuit, thus preventing the desired function of the set of components. “What’s going on?” ask the fortunate ones who encounter this situation. Gotcha. “Yeah, well let’s see. Try following the circuit with your finger, and see if you can find the problem.”

When good questions arise that the students are excited about, it’s an indication that good learning is happening. Minds are engaged, focused, and open for more understanding. Questions give you a view into what the student understands and does not, a form of assessment. I’d much rather have a couple of questions by the student than completed quiz papers. More on that next.²

Answers

Giving answers is a tricky business. As you develop them and hand them out, think like an artisan: try to craft the very best ones possible. There is a huge difference between good and mediocre answers.

In the previous section, I’ve tried to make the point that to naively respond to a question with an answer full of info is often deleterious to real learning. Questions, like blossoms, should be nurtured above all. The question is infinitely more important than the answer. Think about it: answers are useless without questions. Here’s an answer, for example: 3.14159. Another: the Coriolis effect. Clearly, these answers have no meaning at all when orphaned from their questions.

I may be pushing it here, but I’ll go so far as to say that answers are cheap. Textbooks are full of them, as is the Internet. The questions that motivated finding those answers are the gemstones, the real heroes in the story. Furthermore, only with the question can one determine which answers are right.

Nevertheless, when the student has articulated a solid, well-formed question, the time is right for an answer. Holding back info at the wrong time is just as treacherous a pitfall as dishing out too much. When a student asks an articulate question a couple of times, especially with an urgent note in her voice, it is not the time to play guessing games. That little blossom of a question is plenty strong and deserves a good watering; otherwise it may die of drought.

I once worked with a teacher who believed “the discovery method” to be beneficial, but had a rather shallow understanding of it. With the admirable goal of letting students discover the concept at hand, he’d hold back virtually all information until his students were ready to throw him out the window. Worse yet, sometimes he’d buckle under the rising chorus of whining complaints and with great irritation say, “If you don’t want to do the discovery method, we can just go back to straight lecture and textbook!!” His students were often so fed up with groping in the dark that they took him up on the offer and thus forfeited any chance of having a genuine learning experience with the universe.

So, offering information is not a bad thing. The problem comes when you and/or the student slip into the false state of reality where either of you believes that “the answer” can be conveyed in its entirety, to everyone’s satisfaction, in a few seconds. As long as anyone holds this view, the interaction will be doomed to fail. Understanding does not come merely by the acquisition of more information. Any good answer will have several more questions wrapped up in it! A good answer will draw the student farther into the subject area and stoke the fires of fascination. Understanding will be gained slowly through repeated encounters with a set of concepts, with questions intertwining the whole process.

What we’re looking for is a monumental realignment of our students’ idea of learning. We want to model the idea that a question can linger in our midst comfortably, like an old friend, without stress, revisited again and again from various perspectives, each time letting go with a bit more insight and leading us to ever better understanding. Answers, in this new view, are merely preludes to more questions and more learning.

Sometimes a student or group of students has asked one or more questions several times, expressed them clearly, and is obviously keen to take in more information. And sometimes you do have some good information or background to give about the topic. In this case, it may be time for a lecture. There is certainly nothing wrong with a lecture when both teacher and student have agreed to it. The source of information always needs to be evaluated, but if the teacher is honest and the student is skeptical, this is a fine way to learn. This can be part and parcel of a productive tinkering experience.

Here are my two steps of advice for giving answers, once you’ve ensured that the question is well rooted:

1. Give a single morsel of info, connected if at all possible to something the student is already familiar with.

   Student: “So, why does the pitch go up as the drum head tightens?”

   You: “Well, the same thing happened with the string on the guitar we made, right? The pitch of a sound is its frequency, that is, how fast the vibration is going back and forth. If something is tighter, it will tend to go back and forth faster, yes?”

2. Encourage more investigation, using stuff on hand.

   You: “Now see if it happens with this rubber band: stretch it loosely and then tighter, and see if you can see or hear the difference. You can also check to see if changing other factors would also raise the pitch.”

Those two steps are often all you need for a while, maybe the whole class period. Soon you may be hearing additional questions, offsprings of the original. Deal with them each in this same manner.

With your answer, you want to avoid at all cost conveying the idea that since the student has received your morsel of wisdom, she now understands this concept and can rest at ease. After all, “It’s always more complicated than that!” That is a famous quote from my friend and mentor, the director of the Exploratorium Teacher Institute, Paul Doherty. He doesn’t say that just to cover his butt; it is critical that we all understand that whatever insight and information we gain right now here today is but a single stepping stone in the broad universe of questions. When he says it’s more complicated than that, he’s saying don’t get cocky, don’t think you’ve mastered this: your grasp of the phenomenon in question can always stand to be tighter, broader, or deeper.

On the other hand, when you hear a question, you may not know anything at all about the subject; in fact, some of the students may be ahead of you! Do not despair. The trick is to position yourself together with the students in the midst of the tinkering. We’re all learning together, right? This may be a lame statement if you’re the professor and students paid big bucks to be attending your class, but that is simply not the situation when you’re doing tinkering. Heck, I’ve got a physics degree from MIT, and yet I routinely learn new things from farmworkers’ kids about the common materials we employ and how they can function together to do amazing things. One of the golden aspects of teaching with tinkering is that you never know what the students will learn.³ Given this, it is ridiculous to expect the teacher to be able to address each question that arises with a lucid explanation.

You as the facilitator may need to practice responding to questions when you are not sure of the answer. Go into the bathroom, alone, at night, and look at your eyes staring back at you from the mirror. Now repeat after me: “Wow, what a fabulous question! I don’t know!”

I must say that one of the biggest joys in my life is when a student asks me a question I don’t have the answer for. I look forward to this, and cherish it each time it happens. It means good, good learning is on the wing.

When the question is well rooted but you don’t know an answer and have stated as much, the next step is critical: encourage further tinkering. Accompany them if possible, at least to start out.

Student: “When I cover the open ends of these drums, the sound changes a lot. But when I cover this one, it sounds just the same? What’s going on?” You: “Wow, brilliant observation. I’m not sure either, but let’s look at the other factors. The two drums are not the same size, and are also not of the same material. Maybe we can make two of them exactly the same then change just one factor at time. Let’s do it!”

Of course, you can always have your students pack up their questions at the end of a tinkering session and send them off to find answers elsewhere. But you likely have sources of information beyond what your students have. You can always get back to the students once you’ve had a chance to consult these sources—Paul Doherty always lets teachers know they’ve got a couple of days to get more info to the students. No one promised kids instant enlightenment! What’s more, a well-rooted question will help focus ongoing learning. Every PhD candidate’s got one! Professors and professional scientists and engineers and artists have many!

Thus, cherish your questions, question your answers, and take on learning for the long term; this is the way great tinkerers through the ages came up with all the good stuff. It’s a kick, too.