A More Beautiful Question (9 page)

Goyal began studying high schools while still attending one himself. A few years ago, when he was a sixteen-year-old junior at a Long Island high school, he became frustrated with his uninspiring school experience and wondered,
Isn’t there anything better than this?
So he started examining other schools, across the country. I met him when, at seventeen, he was in the midst of his research; he had found the Beautiful Question website and, since he loves asking questions, offered to be one of the site’s inquiry researchers. But he helped me most in providing a crash course on the current state of inquiry-based schools.

Goyal studied schools such as Brightworks and High Tech High, both in California, as well as a handful of others (some public, some private). He was well versed in the approaches of the famously successful schools of Finland and knew that Singapore’s schools also were breaking new ground.

Among the schools he studied up close, Goyal was thrilled by what he found. Some of them had no grades, no tests—none of the memorization of facts that dominated his own school experience. Students got to work on interesting projects, sometimes of their own choosing, lasting for months. At Brightworks, “the entire curriculum is based around big questions.” Goyal said he thought one of the best things about these project-based or inquiry-based schools is that they got students to ask introspective questions such as
What’s interesting to me?
“Nobody’s ever asked them that before,” Goyal said.

Many of the schools doing inquiry-based learning are still too new to judge whether they are turning out extra successful or  productive adults (however one might measure that). But we do know that some of their core principles—the emphasis on letting students explore, direct their own learning, and work on projects instead of taking tests—can also be found at Montessori schools, which have been around long enough to have a track record of adult success stories.

And what a track record Montessori has. Today, so many former students of this private-school system (which only teaches as high as eighth grade) are now running major companies in the tech sector that these alumni have become known as the Montessori Mafia.
²⁴
Their ranks include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and the cofounders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. (The former Google executive Marissa Mayer—now the head of Yahoo!
²⁵
—has said that Brin’s and Page’s Montessori schooling, though long ago, remained a defining influence. “You can’t understand Google unless you know that Larry and Sergey were both Montessori kids,” according to Mayer. “They’re always asking,
Why should it be like that?
It’s the way their brains were programmed early on.”)

Montessori is private, expensive, and exclusive; so are some of the other inquiry-based schools, and those that are public are few and far between. In terms of schools offering this approach, “we’re probably talking about less than one percent of the overall school system,” Goyal points out.

Why do movie tickets cost the same for hits or duds?
²⁷

Challenging students to grapple with real-life questions can help them to grasp abstract concepts, notes Cornell business school professor Robert H. Frank. That’s why Frank asks his pupils to “pose an interesting question based on something they have observed or experienced—and then employ basic economic principles in an attempt to answer it.” Case in point: Frank’s student Peter Hlawitschka asked,
Why do tickets for popular Broadway shows command premium prices, while movie theaters charge the same price no matter how hot the show is?
Hlawitschka’sexplanation, as shared by Frank in a
New York Times
article, is that unlike on Broadway, additional copies of a popular movie can be inexpensively made and shown many times a day on multiple screens. With low prices, movie theater owners can fill many more seats and generate far more revenue than if they charged premium prices for a more limited number of screenings.

At the vast majority of schools, teachers who wish to encourage more inquiry by students must engage in small acts of defiance—going off-script in their lessons, sometimes revising the standard texts and teaching materials. Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher
²⁶
in New York, tells a story in a popular TEDx talk about how he had to devise his own methods to encourage his students to ask their own questions and formulate their own problems.

Meyer pointed out that a typical lesson on the problem of “How long will it take to fill a water tank?” provides far too many tips and hints along the way. Meyer decided to “eliminate all the substeps given to kids, so they have to figure it out. Instead of telling them what matters, they need to decide what matters.”

At first, Meyer began to strip a lot of the text out of his teaching materials, giving kids less, so they would have to ask and think more. Then he came up with an even better idea: He showed his class a video of a water tank filling up . . . “agonizingly slowly,” he says. Students began to “look at their watches, rolling their eyes. And they’re all wondering, at some point, ‘Man,
how long is it gonna take to fill up?
’ That’s how you know you’ve baited the hook.”

Who is entitled to ask questions in class?

What Dan Meyer did in showing the video and then holding back as he waited for that question to form in students’ heads was to transfer ownership: Instead of asking the question himself, he allowed students to think of it on their own—at which point it became
their
question.

This is not insignificant, for two reasons. As Meyer understood, if a student thinks of a question him/herself, it is likely to be of more interest than someone else’s question. But this issue of “Who gets to ask the questions in class?” touches on purpose, power, control, and, arguably, even race and social class.

Dennie Palmer Wolf, a professor
²⁸
of education at Brown University, examined the role of questioning in schools for her academic paper “The Art of Questioning” and found that teachers tended “to monopolize the right to question” in classrooms. (To the extent that students shared in that privilege, Wolf cited research showing that it was “the private preserve of the few—the bright, the male, the English-speaking.”) Moreover, Wolf’s research found that questions were often used by teachers primarily to check up on students, rather than to try to spark interest; such questions were apt to leave a student feeling “exposed” rather than inspired.

John Seely Brown points out that questioning by students can easily come to be seen as a threat by some teachers. “If you come from the belief that teachers are meant to be authoritative, then teachers are going to tend to want to cut off questioning that might reveal what they don’t know.”

Deborah Meier thinks the desire to control students and maintain order isn’t necessarily coming just from teachers. At one point in my talk with her, I mentioned that today’s business culture—with its ad messages promoting “break the rules” and “think different” messages—seems to embrace the same independent-thinking ethos that Meier tried to instill in the grade schoolers in Harlem several decades ago. But when I suggested to Meier that perhaps the establishment had caught up with her ideals—that, with our new hunger for innovation, we might be more willing today to tolerate, and possibly even teach, questioning—she had her doubts.

She believes we continue to live in a society that wants questions to be asked by some, but not others. “Yes, we want a Silicon Valley,” she said, “but
do we really want three hundred million people who actually think for themselves?
”

What is a flame?
²⁹

It seems such a simple question, but do you know the answer? Actor Alan Alda had been fascinated with that question as a child. Nearly seventy years later, Alda started the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York and he started off by organizing a contest to see who could best explain
What is a flame?
The kicker: Kids age nine to twelve would serve as the judges. More than eight hundred scientists or science buffs took up the challenge; the winner, physicist Benjamin Ames, made a seven-minute animated music video explaining oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, incandescence, and oxidation (with atoms represented by Legos). You might say Alda and Ames answered another beautiful question:
How do you make science enjoyable for kids?
The next question Alda’s contest will take on:
What is time?
(See the winning answers at centerforcommunicatingscience.org.)

When Meier started teaching in urban schools, she was dismayed to find that low-income children, in particular, “were trained
not
to ask questions in school,” and she doesn’t think that has changed much in the ensuing years. The discouraging may not be deliberate in most cases. Teachers under pressure to cover more material, and particularly those in underfunded, overcrowded urban schools, can face formidable challenges in trying to manage large classrooms. The imperative to maintain order and “just get through the lesson” can be at odds with allowing kids to question.

But other, subtle forces may be conspiring against student questioning. For instance, children may be self-censoring their questions due to cultural pressures. Joshua Aronson of New York University
³⁰
has studied some of the difficulties that low-income minority students face, such as the disproportionate tendency of schools to suspend African-American boys. But Aronson has also conducted interesting research on what he calls “the stereotype threat.” It zeroes in on the psychology of stigma, in particular “the way human beings respond to negative stereotypes about their racial or gender group.” Aronson studied standardized test performances among black, Latino, and female college students, and his findings suggest that when a person perceives him/herself as the target of a well-known stereotype (e.g., girls aren’t good at math), it can have an adverse effect on performance in school.

Would students who are battling against stereotypes be less inclined to interrupt lessons by asking questions, revealing to the rest of the class that they don’t know something?
“Absolutely,” Aronson said. “Fear is the enemy of curiosity. Unfortunately, if you’re in that situation, you may feel pressure to look a certain way to others.” That can cause students to act as if they already know or just don’t care. “You’re inclined to play it safe,” Aronson says, rather than risk the possibility of confirming the stereotype.

Parents, too, undoubtedly play a role in determining which kids ask questions in school. A recent study of fourth- and fifth-grade
³¹
students by Indiana University sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco found that students from families with higher incomes were more likely to be encouraged by their parents to ask questions at school, whereas children from modest backgrounds were encouraged by their parents to be more deferential to authority—and to try to figure things out for themselves, instead of asking for help. “Even very shy middle-class children learned to feel comfortable approaching teachers with questions, and recognized the benefits of doing so,” Calarco reports. “Working-class children instead worried about making teachers angry if they asked for help at the wrong time or in the wrong way, and also felt others would judge them as not smart if they asked for help.” These differences, Calarco found, stemmed directly from what “children learn from their parents at home.”

Deborah Meier, however, bristled at those findings. “The study makes it sound as if those lower-income parents are wrong, but they’re
not
wrong,” she said. “They know that if their kids ask questions, they might get in trouble. They’re telling their children to be careful in school.” The middle-class kids are in a different situation, Meier notes. “They go to school feeling safe.” And because they feel safe, they can take the risk of raising their hands.

But even the “safe” middle-class student who has been encouraged by parents to question may still find that the typical classroom environment doesn’t stimulate curiosity or inspire inquiry. One of the “master questioners” I
³²
interviewed was a fifteen-year-old high school student, Jack Andraka, who, through his own remarkable journey of inquiry, was able to develop a new, highly effective, and inexpensive way to screen for certain types of cancer. (The full story of how Andraka used questions to solve the problem is in the next chapter.) I was curious whether someone such as Andraka, who clearly is inclined to question, learned to do so in school, and whether he tended to ask a lot of questions there.

He said his parents taught him to question. “They would ask me questions, and they would get me to ask them questions—but then they would never answer the questions they guided me to,” Andraka told me. “They would instead have me go and explore through experiments or personal experience and make a hypothesis.”

At school—which Andraka described as “your ordinary public high school,” located in Maryland—“we really do not have students ask enough questions and do enough exploration by themselves. The teacher tells you what to do and you do it. You’re really restricted with these tight guidelines. In my opinion, that’s not the best way to learn.”