“There is no such thing as a stupid question,” announced Prof. Riddell. I had just joined Smith College as an undergraduate and this was my very first class. “Yeah, right!” I muttered to myself, disbelievingly. All through my schooling in India, the one thing I learned was to not ask questions. Questions derail the smooth flow of a lesson’s delivery, taking it into unforeseen territories and uncharted waters. More importantly, it is the teacher’s prerogative to ask questions; the student’s job is to answer. We would sneer at an overenthusiastic peer who asked too many questions. “Stupid question, duh!” “Buttering up the teacher.” “It’s not even going to come on the exam!” we’d groan. The message—questions are not valuable; they are just a nuisance. The only acceptable questions to ask in class were procedural—those relating to assignment deadlines, coursework, or tests. But Prof. Riddell seemed to have different ideas.
If Smith taught me to be tolerant of peers asking questions, my career as a progressive educator made me realize that student questions are what drive deep and meaningful learning. Questions are the outcome of curiosity and wonder (Chin & Osborne, 2008; Demirdogen & Cakmakci, 2014). Questions give students control over their learning and are a way for children to make sense of their world (Biddulph et al., 1986; Lee & Barnett, 2020). Generating questions builds creative and reflective thinking while also honing problem-solving skills (White,1977). Posing questions is a form of problem finding that should lead to meaningful inquiry (Brooks & Brooks, 1999). Questions also reveal a child’s understanding and possible misconceptions (Baram-Tsabari et al., 2006; Falchetti et al., 2007). It is therefore crucial to intentionally create and foster supportive environments where student questions are encouraged (Sengupta et al., 2020).
In 2009, I started a tiny constructivist school called Al Qamar Academy (you can learn more about it here). The teachers and I worked hard to create an environment where students could and would ask questions. Our science workbooks included a section for jotting down questions. Unfortunately, students viewed this exercise as a chore and rarely wrote anything meaningful. We put Question Boxes in classrooms, where shy students could simply write questions that struck them and pop them in. Sometimes we got a jewel of a question. The query “Can we hear sound?” led a fifth grader to investigate synesthesia and present her learning at the school’s Open Day. But, if truth be told, the Question Box was frequently empty. We created a class called Self-Directed-Learning (SDL), where kids came up with a broad question and conducted independent research to answer it. SDL derailed when we realized that students were deliberately asking shallow questions to avoid the work that would follow. What became clear was that students didn’t know how to translate their curiosity into a question. Our constructivist project had hit a roadblock: students were not yet convinced to take part in the construction! At that point, we were not aware of more formal pedagogical approaches like the Right Question Institute’s QFT method to teach the art of asking questions. I wondered if there was a way to stimulate children’s interest so they would generate genuinely curious questions.
About this time, I got involved with a project jointly conducted by Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBSCE), India’s premier STEM education research institute, and Sawaliram, an initiative by Indian scientist-educators to create an online repository of children’s questions which would inform curriculum development. I had just started collecting questions when COVID-19 hit. Forget questions—even basic class interaction stopped as students were muted behind their Zoom profile pictures in our online classrooms. That’s when I had a brainwave.
I started the “Weekly Video Activity,” in which fifth to eighth graders watched short videos selected from websites such as The Kid Should See This or Byrdseed’s Curiosities & Puzzlements, and jotted down all the questions that occurred to them. That’s it. Sweet and simple. No further work, no research project, nothing. Just watch a video, let the sense of wonder and curiosity flow, and post the questions in Google Classroom. Each week, I would anxiously await their submissions. And I was truly surprised by the plethora of questions the students came up with. These were genuinely curious inquiries—the ones with the “why,” the “how,” and the “what if.” Even better, the majority of students were participating in this optional assignment.
I remember one particular video which typified the process. The video, called “Vancouver Island Hummingbirds,” shows these tiny creatures flapping around a girl who is standing absolutely still. The birds seem to have no fear of her. One or two dart in to feed from the container she is holding. For some reason, this video really fascinated the children. It challenged mental models about how birds fly and extended their thinking about the mechanics of flight, feeding, and bird behavior. “How do hummingbirds stay suspended in the air?” “What makes them flap their wings so often?” “How do hummingbirds move?” “Why do they have such a long beak?” Upon analysis, I found that one group of questions related to observation—“What’s the girl feeding the birds?” Or, “What’s in the bowl?” Other questions went deeper: “Why are only a few birds drinking, while the rest just flap in the air?” Some questions were inferential, like “How did the birds trust the girl to come up so close?” while others involved perspective-taking. We got a load of questions that would have made for fantastic inquiry.
As an educator, perhaps the most thought-provoking questions in this year-long process were directed at me, such as, “Why did our teacher choose this video?” These questions forced me to examine my assumptions about children’s responses to the videos. Such questions also challenged my notion of what are “acceptable” or good questions. As a constructivist educator I had spent time discussing open-ended and closed questions. I had taught students to use the five W’s and one H (who, what, where, when, why, and how) when constructing questions. I had often asked them to explain why they were asking a certain question or what connections they saw to the topic at hand. How would I have reacted to such personal challenges in an in-person classroom setting? Would such questions have even been asked? Was our class culture one where children felt pressured to channel their curiosity into the “right” kind of open-ended questions we normally encouraged? These realizations were important for my personal growth as a progressive educator.
We kept posting videos throughout the year on a range of topics, including animals, places in the world, scientific phenomena, the history of tramcars, and chocolate making. In selecting videos, I tapped into my own sense of childlike curiosity to select shorts that filled me with wonder. I mixed and matched topics, taking care not to repeat the same one too frequently. I also ensured that each video was really brief. Given that this was a one-way street, where children asked questions that no one answered, I took care to avoid controversial videos that required deliberate class discussion to process.
Questions came pouring in. At the end of the year we had close to 800 questions across about 20 videos from a cohort of 40 fifth to eighth graders. Select questions were uploaded on the Sawaliram website and some were answered by experts. Unfortunately, Al Qamar shut down in 2021, and I have no way of letting all those kids know that their beautiful questions are being answered, inspiring teachers and shaping how pedagogues think about curriculum making.
So what was it about this experiment that inspired the kids to ask questions? One possibility was the lack of pressure: kids simply had to watch a funky video and ask questions without worrying about having to follow them up with more work. Zero expectations from the educators. Another possibility was the brevity of the assignment, which took just 5–10 minutes to complete. A third possibility was that the videos were watched in the peace and quiet of the student’s home, rather than in a busy, active classroom. Fourth, there was the anonymity of the question-asking process—each question was posted as a private submission in Google Classroom and kids did not have to worry about their peers judging them.
It is only apt that this article concludes with niggling questions that remain with me till today. One, how could the richness of these questions have been harnessed to drive meaningful inquiry? Two, what is the impact on a child when their curiosity is not satisfied? I mean, we had collected all these questions, but provided no answers or opportunities for inquiry. Had I neglected my responsibility as an educator? As a counterpoint, I wonder: Does every valuable question a child asks have to drive formal inquiry that we educators can observe, track, and assess, albeit formatively? Isn’t the practice of being curious and asking questions of value in and of itself? Wouldn’t the questions—or at least, some of them—lead children to genuinely independent inquiry whether or not their teachers were aware of it? And isn’t that ok? It is perhaps appropriate that I am left with more questions than answers, but I do have one concrete piece of advice: Watch the Vancouver Island Hummingbird video with your students. I wonder: What will they ask?
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