Al Kyte's Life Take-Aways

   

Teaching has been my way of life, whether mentoring individuals, teaching in classrooms, coaching on athletic fields, guiding on trout streams, or speaking before large audiences.  Wherever my interests have taken root, I have soon found myself teaching.  The more I have done that, the more I have been drawn to using questions.

The least-inspiring classes and meetings I have attended have aways been lectures—someone telling me something.  Although that may be an efficient use of time, teachers have the additional obligation to help students learn to think.  Socrates taught that the most we can do to stimulate thinking is to ask a series of questions, causing a person to learn for himself.  I have used that approach in a method called “guided discovery” in which the teacher, the one with the answers, is not allowed to give an answer.  I found it frustrating not to be able to blurt out the answer.  Instead, my preparation included anticipating incorrect answers and coming up with increasingly easy questions to guide the students toward discovering each correct answer.  When a student came up with the right answer, I could move forward to the next general question.  This teaching may appear to be easy, but preparing such questions is not.

The teacher’s role is also about creating interest—motivating students.  By their very nature, questions do this by opening up a conversation to various possibilities whereas lectures often shut down any dialogue.  Even the simplest question, “I wonder why…?” can invoke a sense of mystery and excite the imagination, inviting people to look at a thing in a new way.  I love it when I see that happening.

Questions can also help afterward in evaluating the learning experience.  When teaching sport skills, for example, I have often seen when the learning occurred, the “breakthrough” moment in a performance.  Wanting to know what triggered that learning, my first inclination was to give credit to my teaching approach as most teachers would.  But eventually I realized I learned more by simply asking students, “What were you thinking when making that movement?”  One time a student answered that he had blocked out what I was saying to focus on something else.  That was humbling, but at least I found out what had worked.  I suspect that students learn by trying different things more than we realize.

More than ever I am now using questions in my everyday conversations as well.  My first intentional use of conversational questions occurred when as a shy teenager in uncomfortable social settings I learned to ask questions of the person I was meeting.  I had found that most people liked talking about themselves, which took pressure off of my having to speak.  

Sometimes when I ask questions, people act as if I don’t know much (sometimes true) and welcome the opportunity to impress me with what they know.  While this is often helpful, the people who impress me even more are those who are also asking questions, forcing me to answer at times.  The questions I love most draw out stories from another person’s life, wonderful stories I would miss if I hadn’t asked those questions.  Most people have stories, and I believe my most interesting conversations are often sitting there next to me waiting for the right question to bring them forth.  I wish over the years I had spent more time asking questions and learning to ask better questions.