Live the Questions Now
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
Recently, when I was facilitating a professional learning session, a participant asked me to give her the answer to a question. When guiding her to explore the question, she became extremely frustrated. Her reply was, “If my students asked for the answer, I would tell it to them.”
Our culture is moving quickly to the expectation that answers be generated at the drop of a hat. As of 2015, Google states that it “now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.”
If educators are asking questions that can be answered instantly through a search engine, then what type of questions are we asking? And if we are educators who give answers directly to students without allowing them to learn on their own, then what type of thinking are we fostering?
In order for our country’s education to move forward past the 1900’s school-house classroom model of teacher-directed lectures and single answer questions, we need to value the power of a question and provide learning experiences that allow for inquiry. Terry Heick (2015) said it well in her article “The Power of I Don’t Know” that “questions are more important than the answers...There is value in answers as knowledge, but there is lasting power in inquiry because it’s a student-centered and self-sustaining process.”1
When students are given opportunities to own their learning, to be advocates for themselves and be resourceful, they are able to experience the authentic power of telling their own story, and shaping their own understanding.
Consider the participant I spoke of earlier. Although she “shut down” when encountered with a question she didn’t know the answer to, she eventually explored the dilemma and came to the answer on her own. This fruition of knowledge was then shared with fellow colleagues and in turn, propelled her own confidence to continue the project. Additionally, this struggle and self-realization made her aware of how her students may feel when encountering similar experiences. Students need to be given the opportunities to explore, struggle in that experience, and come to an understanding on their own. If educators can value and model this struggle while encouraging perseverance to live the questions and be resourceful to solve the unknown, then we will facilitate curious learners who are innovative and active problem-solvers.
Through my own experiences as a learner, an educator, and teacher leader, I continuously observe that the more we value and live the questions now, the more we progress and prepare our students to be proactive citizens in the global world. We must foster the culture of moving beyond single answers generated at the drop of a hat and propel students to thrive for meaningful learning experiences; experiences driven by their innate curiosity to ask questions.
1 Heick, Terry. “The Power of I Don’t know.” te@chthgouht., 15 September 2015. Web. 17 September
2015. http://www.teachthought.com/learning/the-power-of-i-dont-know/
2 The Power Of I Don’t Know; image attribution flickr user Rebecca Zuniga
