Good questions are key to helping people learn effectively. Questions help to guide and focus the discussion, while leaving space for people to explore and share their own thoughts, experiences and perspectives. This gets people actively involved in their own learning, and helps them come to a good understanding of issues in order to reach to their own conclusions.
Thinking carefully about the questions we ask can make a big difference to the discussion that follows. This guide offers tips on when to use questions, what to ask and what words to choose.
Questioning is a great technique when you genuinely don’t know the answer. For example, if you ask a group “How do you feel about…?” or “What is your experience of…?” there is no way their answer can be wrong. By contrast, if you already have a very specific answer you want the group to produce, it is a common ‘teachery’ technique to try to lead participants there through questions. This can come across as ‘guess the right answer in my head’, and it may be more empowering to simply say what you think, and ask them what they make of it!
Work out what you want to know, and the simplest way to ask it. It is even more important to take time planning your questions if you are breaking up into small groups, and want people to have a focused discussion without a facilitator.
Use open questions when you want to invite a long response. They usually start with words such as 'Why...?' or 'What’ or ‘How?’
Use closed questions when you want to restrict the options. Closed questions invite “Yes”, “No” or another one word answer.
Open questions have the benefit of giving participants freedom to answer with information they think is important. Closed questions have benefits when you need to keep the discussion focused. For example, the open question: “What do you think about the current proposal?” helps the group to keep exploring different perspectives. The closed question: “Can you agree to the current proposal?” is more useful if you think you have reached agreement but need to check before moving on.
A particularly effective way of supporting people to learn in a workshop is to give them a lifelike experience relevant to the topic, and then use questions to draw out what they can learn from it.
A series of well chosen questions gets people actively involved. This makes a workshop more interactive and engaging. It also encourages a depth of thinking that a presentation doesn't often achieve. Asking questions enables participants to explore ideas, reflect on their experiences, and come up with their own solutions to problems.
You want to help an inexperienced group gain some skills at giving media interviews. You could give them a presentation on top tips for interview technique. Or you could ask them questions:
"Think of an interview you've seen or heard recently - did the interviewee come across well? ... Why? What made the interview a success? ... What was it about the way they spoke that made them sound so convincing? ... Anything else? ... What did they do that was less successful? ... What do you think might have worked better instead? OK, so to summarise, you think that a good interview.…"
The diagram below shows a useful model for how people learn most effectively from experiences. This was first developed by David Kolb in 1984 and has been widely adapted, interpreted and used to structure training sessions.
The basic idea is that you can best support learning by creating a lifelike experience in a workshop (e.g. practising a media interview), then asking questions to help them reflect on the specifics of that experience, before stepping back to draw out general lessons they can learn from those reflections, then thinking through in detail how these lessons could be applied in a similar context.
Start by encouraging the group to step back, notice and interpret the experience they’ve had. This helps people focus on the specifics of the situation and get curious about what happened and why. Ask questions like:
Follow up with questions that encourage them to compare this experience to other similar ones. For example:
This helps move participants on to the next stage.
Help participants to draw broader lessons from the experience, by making connections to other experiences, spotting patterns and forming or revising theories. This helps people condense the learning into a more abstract format which can also be applied to future situations. Questions could be:
If the group doesn’t find your questions easy to answer, here are some things to try:
Allow enough time! If you don’t get an immediate response it can be tempting to pile in with another question or even your own answer. However, remember that participants need different amounts of time to formulate a reply, and by leaving a silence you get the chance to hear from the people who are still thinking! You could even ask everyone to wait for 30 seconds after your questions so that you don’t always hear first from the quickest people.
Rephrase. When a question doesn't get an answer try asking it again using different wording. Avoid just repeating the same question. The chances are that if the participants couldn't (or wouldn't) answer it the first time, they're not going to do so just because you say it again!
Break the issue down. If you don't get a response to a broad question, break it down and ask a series of specific questions. If "What have you learnt about communication?" doesn't get you anywhere, you might ask "Well, what happened in the roleplay when you were approached by the 'police officer'?"... "What was it about the way you were approached that made you feel that way?"... "Was it just the way they spoke to you?"... "OK, so you think that their body language was important? What did you notice about their body language?"... and so on.
Draw on people's existing experience to help them find solutions to a problem - "Does this remind you of anything that you do in your everyday life? What strategies do you have for dealing with it in that context? How might those be applied here?"
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