by Stephen Bloch-Schulman

This post developed from a Blog Contributor who presented for the Talking Teaching discussion series hosted by the APA Committee on Teaching.

On April 12th, nine participants joined me via videoconference in talking about question-asking and how to teach for more and better question-asking from our students. This was part of the Talking Teaching sessions, sponsored by the APA Committee on Teaching Philosophy. I had proposed this topic because focusing on and thematizing question-asking as a skill essential to doing philosophy well was a central conclusion from a study I conducted comparing reading strategies and skills of students and professional philosophers. In that study, I found that the number and use of questions by philosophers were the most powerful differentiating characteristics between the two groups. Interestingly, to me, it is a skill all-too-often undervalued in philosophy pedagogy and philosophy pedagogy research (e.g., see Mills). And I readily admit that I, too, had not done enough explicit teaching or thinking about how to teach this essential skill. This conversation was a chance, therefore, for me and the other participants to learn from each other about how we might do our students better, in this regard.

I asked the participants to share their answers to the following questions in preparation for the conversation: “What interests you in a conversation about teaching philosophic question-asking?” and “What questions should we be discussing during our conversation?” I found the questions fit fairly neatly into three categories (familiar to anyone who has participated in one of the AAPT workshops or seminars). I will structure the next three sections like our conversation, starting with the overarching question, and expanding on and highlighting some of the discussion below.

1. What goals do we have when we teach question-asking as a skill?

In thinking about what goals we ought to set, one persistent concern was our own inability to know what makes for a better question. We also highlighted the different sub-goals we might take to be included: reading closely to see what questions motivate an author, analyzing the questions of others to reveal how they work and what work they do, finding relations between questions, the ability to critically evaluate one’s own questions, among others.

One important insight that emerged was that we had had the best success when we thought about teaching question-asking skills in more modest terms. Just like we don’t teach Ethics itself, we might teach utilitarianism and care ethics (and even small parts of those larger ethical frameworks), participants found the best ingress to teaching question-asking to be to think more modestly. Some participants noted, in this regard, how important teaching a single distinction is and how it can, if infused into subsequent dialogue, lead to sharper questions. One example was of introducing the distinction between empirical questions and normative questions and pushing students to use this as a lens for figuring out what kinds of questions, and what kind of evidence, would help in each particular case they studied. In this vein, categorizing types of questions is a useful way to help students get a handle on what can feel to them like an amorphous knack that some people have and others lack. Likewise, helping students see how question-asking is a skill that one can improve through practice and with feedback is essential for student motivation and pedagogical efficacy.

2. What pedagogies do we use to teach this skill?

In discussing how to teach question-asking, there was a focus on practice and repetition: how do we give students opportunities to ask questions and then get feedback on the questions? We brainstormed some ideas, including brainstorming different questions, surfacing categories and placing questions into those categories, giving students the chance to individually or collectively determine the questions for their assessments, and asking students to bring questions to class and then to read and highlight which of the questions their classmates authored that they found particularly helpful. One particularly useful strategy asked students to think from others’ perspectives to try to voice what others might ask in a particular circumstance. The overall theme here was to identify question-asking as an explicit goal and then to build regular opportunities into our classes to practice that skill.

3. How do we assess this skill?

There was interesting disagreement when it came to assessment. Many participants, even some who regularly included question-asking as a skill and gave students time to practice the skill, were reluctant to grade their work in this area. Some argued that, because they couldn’t clearly identify what made for better questions, they ought not grade student questions. Others argued that without something more algorithmic, grading question-asking would be unfair. On the other side, some felt comfortable grading questions, implying that question-asking is no harder a skill to grade than other complex philosophical skills. This group highlighted that if modest and clear question-asking skills are explicitly named in the class goals and participants are given sufficient opportunity to practice these skills with careful and frequent feedback, that grading and assessment can follow fairly and accurately. And, they implied, if we don’t grade this skill but grade others, students are much less likely to take this skill seriously.

In the end, there was little consensus about whether and to what extent we can teach, and ought to teach and grade, question-asking as a skill. Given the topic, this seems appropriate.

Stephen Bloch-Schulman, Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Elon University, was the inaugural winner of the Prize for Excellence in Philosophy Teaching, awarded by the American Philosophical Association, the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, and the Teaching Philosophy Association. He was also the winner of the Lenssen Prize (with Ann J. Cahill) in 2014. He is co-author, with Anthony Weston, of Thinking Through Questions: A Concise Invitation to Critical, Expansive, and Philosophical Inquiry, forthcoming, from Hackett Publishing.