In the second installment of a two-episode series, Sarah Westbrook, director of professional learning at the Right Question Institute, talked with Kimberly Douglas of the Learning Vibes Podcast about the power of questioning.
Their conversation dove into the steps of the Question Formulation Technique, exploring the role and rationale behind each step.
As an example, they talked about challenges in identifying open- and closed-ended questions. “A lot of people have been taught or trained to discount closed-ended questions,” Westbrook noted. “There’s a lot of baggage to labeling a question ‘closed.'”
However, in doing this identification activity, “It’s much more important that it forced you to think about the language you used and if it was getting at the information you wanted or not,” Westbrook added. What you want to take away from this process is “being strategic in the language that you’re using” to ask questions.
The conversation sprouted from an in-podcast QFT session Westbrook and Douglas did together around the quotation, “Curiosity is deviant.” It comes from the book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It, by Ian Leslie.
Later in the episode, Westbrook and Douglas talked about the ways in which questions can help bridge divides. Westbrook offered the observation that, on social media platforms where people often share strong opinions, “It’s very disarming sometimes to ask someone a question.”
Ultimately, she said, “We need children to grow up and we need the adults in our communities right now who are able to ask their own questions, be able to navigate these solutions, and move forward as somebody who can participate effectively.”
You can listen to this episode and the first episode in this series — “The Power of Questioning: A Conversation with Sarah Westbrook of the Right Question Institute” — at the Learning Vibes website.