Raising Critical and Creative Thinkers

Morgan Leverett, an African-American banker, shared the following observation with me: “White families let their kids ask questions and actually answer them as though they’re questions coming from adults. This wasn’t something I had growing up.”

Although epitomizing white families and respecting children at the same level as adults are not winning educational strategies, I do acknowledge Morgan’s point about the importance of questioning. Often times, busy parents can feel frustrated with the incessant questions that keep coming at them. However, unless your child is being annoying for the sake of being annoying (e.g., children are astute enough to pick-up on — and can take playful pleasure — when their parents are getting annoyed by strings of “why” questions), encouraging them to ask questions, and seriously taking the moment to ponder them together, can be helpful not only to their self-confidence, but future development as critical and creative thinkers.

To really understand how important it is to ask good questions, consider the following big questions that have been asked in recent history:

“What if my spare room can be rented out?” — Airbnb
“Why do cars have to run on gas?”— Tesla
“How can I send text messages for free?” — WhatsApp
“What if people can fly?” — Wright Brothers
“What if running shoes can be improved?” — Nike

Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment (SMILE)

Whenever the topic of asking questions comes up, I think of Paul Kim from Stanford University.

Paul and I work on a project called SMILE, which includes SMILE University and SMILE Pi. Paul has long researched and documented the benefits of teaching good questioning. SMILE is an open, democratic web based platform, wherein students freely share “big questions,” and then the quality of their questions can be evaluated and ranked (1 to 5 stars) by peers. The goal is to encourage learners to ask “higher order thinking” questions.

Recently, Paul incorporated a smart algorithm into SMILE that helps users understand why the question they share is a 5-star or not. The algorithm helps bring standardization to the SMILE community. Go create an account and check it out.

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