Socratic Questions

Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, “So? Did you learn anything today?” But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?”
Isidor Isaac Rabi

Questions, by their very nature are designed to initiate learning for the questioner. But the best questions also initiate learning for the questionee.

As Seth Godin stated, the best creative solutions don’t come from finding good answers to the questions posed, but from inventing new questions.

The opening up of a new field of study arises from the posing of questions, not the delivery of answers. Similarly, a field of thinking only stays alive if enough new questions are being generated to drive the process of re-think.

Rather than just feeding endless content by rote, great teachers inspire their students to ask more questions, often even beyond the scope of the original course. The teaching of raw content halts the momentum of learning, whereas questions are the connecting points of perpetual learning.

I love talking about OSS with all manner of people. There are so many good questions yet to be asked. A brief starting list of questions is posed in an earlier post about the What if? game.

What questions are you asking about your OctopOSS and the world of OSS in general? What questions are you dying to ask?

As an educator and/or student, can you increase your speed of learning through Socratic Questioning (refer to the section entitled “Sample Socratic Dialog” in this link)?

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