Opening minds with open questions.

Written by John Taylor

A great many of the questions asked during the course of everyday lessons are of the form: ‘Can you guess what I, the teacher, am thinking?’ There is an expected right answer, and relief all around, for both class and teacher, when someone guesses it. What are the 7 signs of life? Can anyone remember the equation linking work done, force and distance? What is the name of the second group in the periodic table?

These questions are the staple of much teacher-student dialogue. They are also closed questions: questions to which there is a single correct answer. Answering closed questions call for recollection, or intelligent guesswork. What closed questions don’t call for is independent thought, or reflection on the merits of alternative possible answers. As such, their value as promoters of learning by means of engaged inquiry is limited.

By contrast, open questions, questions to which there is no obvious right answer, are invitations to thought. I suggest therefore that asking questions to which there is more than one plausible, defensible answer is a good plan if our aim is to foster students whose experience of science is one of active, engaged, independent thinking, not passive reception of the right answers (where rightness is determined by the set of prescribed answers on the exam mark scheme).

Let me illustrate the educational potency of open questions with a question I posed to my year 9 students this week. It had been suggested to me by a colleague in our Learning Support Department. She had fallen into discussion with a group of students about whether you use more energy if you go up the stairs one at a time, or two at a time.

I posed this to the class for discussion, inviting typed responses to a Google Classroom question as a way of drawing everyone in. Once we had a diverse range of answers I bounced the question around the class, inviting students who disagreed with the answer just given to defend their alternative.

It wasn’t long before two students were into a vigorous debate, even to the extent of grabbing the pen and sketching out their argument on the board. Others chipped in to offer support to one side or the other, or to raise points from their own experience, such as the fact that going two steps at a time leaves you feeling like you’ve used more energy.

Which answer was deemed to be right? After one or two students had put the case well, consensus grew behind the answer that the energy used is the same. But that was far from the end of the discussion. By introducing the idea of power, we added another element to the discussion, an element that invited an experimental test. Even if the energy used is the same, perhaps the rate at which the energy is used differs. So we were off outside the classroom to see if we could measure the power used by a student heading up a flight of stairs.

This in itself suggests a further interesting connection: from open questions to research projects. This is a story for another blog, but let me return to the matter of open questions.

For beyond the scientifically open questions (open, that is, in the sense that there are plausible scientific arguments that can be given for different answers) lie philosophically open questions: questions about which it is plausible to suggest that there simply is no known answer.

Profound philosophical questions lie just beneath the surface of most of the topics we teach. For example, a lesson on the conservation of energy can readily turn into a discussion of the mysterious nature of the Big Bang cosmological model. If energy cannot be created or destroyed, must it have existed forever? Such a question in turn raises further questions about the nature of time, the fate of the universe, the possibility of an infinite regress of events – topics which sit squarely in the borderlands of science and philosophy.

These are emphatically not closed questions of the sort that might come up in a normal science exam (where, for example, you might find that the mark scheme states that you only get full marks if you remember to recite the fact that energy can only be ‘transferred’). What, therefore, you might ask, is the point of asking such questions?

For me, a large part of the answer lies in the fact which is confirmed whenever I ask such a question: these questions ignite interest, enthusiasm, even passion. They are potent promoters of inquiry and deeper thinking.

That ought to be reason enough for including some of them, from time to time, in our science lessons. But if you remain unconvinced, or worried about the pressure to ‘teach what they need to know’, let me add a further argument.

Open debate about philosophical ideas is inextricably intertwined with science itself. Look at the history of science, and you will find it features profound and unresolved debate between such luminaries as Einstein and Bohr about the nature of physical reality, or the connection between reality and perception. One very good reason for including some discussion of such questions in our science teaching is that they are part and parcel of science itself. If we want to be true to our subject, our teaching needs to be open to embrace the unsettling, fascinating, profound and mysterious domain of philosophical questions that merge with science at its outer limits.

John Taylor

Director of Learning, Teaching and Innovation

Cranleigh School