Ask Yourself the Real Question!

Am I able to teach better than I am teaching right now?

Be willing to question any plan of action or policy you employ that is not working.

If a firefighter is attempting to extinguish a grease fire, should she or he use water? Should the firefighter use sand? What if a nurse learned, many years ago, specific techniques to inserting an intravenous drip, and your arm isn’t complying with that nurse’s past training? What would you want her to do?

The Science I Explored

Questions are powerful. Not only does hearing a question affect what our brains do in that instant, it can also shape our future behavior. And that can be a powerful principle in the workplace.

Questions trigger a mental reflex known as “instinctive elaboration.” When a question is posed, it takes over the brain’s thought process. And when your brain is thinking about the answer to a question, it can’t contemplate anything else.

Behavioral scientists have also found that just asking people about their future decisions significantly influences those decisions, a phenomenon known as the “mere measurement effect.” Back in 1993, social scientists Vicki Morwitz, Eric Johnson, and David Schmittlein conducted a study with more than 40,000 participants that revealed that simply asking someone if people were going to purchase a new car within six months increased their purchase rates by 35%.

So why do questions have such influence on the decision-making process? First and foremost, they prompt the brain to contemplate a behavior, which increases the probability that it will be acted upon.

In fact, decades of research has found that the more the brain contemplates a behavior, the more likely it is that we will engage in it. That’s not all. Just thinking about doing something can shift your perception and even alter your body chemistry. For instance, imagine sipping some lemon juice. What does it taste like? As you briefly think about lemon juice, notice the sensations occurring in your mouth. You’ll find that something totally beyond your control occurred—you began to salivate more and you could almost taste the tartness of the juice.[1] 

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A Situation

As an educator, you find yourself looking at what you learned about implementing a curriculum and how it compares to your actual classroom setting. You observe time when children are engaged and retain the ideas in the topic, and other times they are engaged and nothing seems to stick. The teacher is trying to determine the best practices for retaining information.

Reassessing Teaching Strategies

We are looking at how our brain uses our questions to get closer to solutions.  Best practices exist for getting children to learn. I have mentioned that hands-on learning and having an emotionally safe learning environment can be included in a teacher’s strategy. But there are many practices worth exploring and learning about to suit your specific needs on any given topic and grade level.

For example, drawing a diagram (or cutting and pasting pictures) with written labels for each item depicted may be great for describing consumers and producers in a food chain. But would a diagram with labels work best for introducing arrays? What would an educator use to introduce arrays? The answer you come up with is your strategy. How do I…? What is A good way to…? If my lesson included _ , would it increase the understanding? These are just a few approaches. So ask yourself questions about your strategies.

Don’t go doubting every lesson idea…just the ones that aren’t working or lesson strategies that can be improved upon. If you’re making a cake and it comes out tasting like bread, you missed a step. Replace cake with your favorite dish. I bet you won’t give that up. The teacher can always simultaneously be a student—a student of the craft of educating children.

Now see your students actively learning after a tweak in your strategies. Say it with me: “I am always improving and growing my skill set.”

Quotes

Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.

—Kenichi Ohmae

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

—Winston Churchill

[1] David Hoffeld, “Want to know what your brain does when it hears a question,” The Science of Work, February 21, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/3068341/ want-to-know-what- your-brain-does-when-it-hears-a-question/.