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30 Thought-Provoking Questions to Ask Your Students

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30 Thought-Provoking Questions to Ask Your Students

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30 Thought-Provoking Questions to Ask Your Students:

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by Dorothea Lange

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Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange

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Photo by Ken Geiger

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Photo by John White of the Chicago Sun-Times

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The What and How

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Essential questions rarely arise in a first draft. Here’s how to construct good ones.

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21 Ways to Check for Student Understanding

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21 Ways to Check for Student Understanding

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21 Ways to Check for Student Understanding

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What Are Habits of Mind? - The Institute for Habits of Mind

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For Teachers Ever find yourself doubting whether you are creative? Many people assume that creativity is a rare commodity that someone is either born with or not and that it is reserved for the elite among us: artists, writers, and composers, or the likes of Miles Davis, Steve Jobs, or Frida Kahlo.

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30 Thought-Provoking Questions

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Over a decade ago, cognitive scientists John D. Bransford and Daniel J. Schwartz asked fifth graders and college students to create a recovery plan to protect bald eagles from extinction. Surprisingly, the two groups came up with plans of similar quality (although the college students had better spelling skills).

But the researchers decided to delve deeper. They asked both groups to generate questions about important issues needed to create recovery plans. On this task, they found big differences.

College students focused on critical issues of interdependence between eagles and their habitats ("What type of eco-system supports eagles?" and "What different kinds of specialists are needed for different recovery areas?").

Fifth graders tended to focus on features of individual eagles ("How big are they?" and "What do they eat?"). The college students had cultivated the ability to ask questions, the cornerstone of critical thinking. They had learned how to learn.

So far there's no field of "question studies," but Rothstein and his co-director at the Right Question Institute, Luz Santana, are among a handful of thinkers making a career of taking a close look at how questions work

Yet formal education, which is driven by test taking, is increasingly failing to require students to ask the kind of questions that build critical thinking skills.

"Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum and for standardised tests," the scientists write. "But people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions, about their own medical treatment, say, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands."

Dan Rothstein, cofounder of the Right Question Institute, a Cambridge-based nonprofit that promotes good question-asking as a life skill, agrees. He believes that learning how to ask questions should be considered as critical as learning how to read, write, and do basic math.

"It's not deliberately taught because it seems to be a natural part of speech that doesn't require much work," Rothstein says. "It's assumed that anyone can do it."

So far there's no field of "question studies," but Rothstein and his co-director at the Right Question Institute, Luz Santana, are among a handful of thinkers making a career of taking a close look at how questions work, what our brains are doing when they put a question together, and how questions could drive learning, child development, innovation, business strategy, and creativity.

Rothestein and his colleagues are trying to tell us something very important: In the 21st century, we can no longer afford to ignore the strategies that promote critical thinking and problem solving skills. It's time for a thorough examination of what makes a good question, and how students can benefit from staying curious.

Types of Questions

Display Questions.

These are designed to elicit learners' prior knowledge and to check comprehension. They often focus on the form or meaning of language structures and items, and the teacher already knows the answer.

What does ..... mean?

When do we use .....?

What comes after .....?

What's the opposite of .....?

Where's the stress in .....?

Referential Questions

These require the learner to provide information, give an opinion, explain or clarify. They often focus on content rather than language, require 'follow-up' or 'probe' questions, and the answer is not necessarily known by the teacher.

What do you think about .....?

Have you ever....when/where .....?

If you had .....what.....?

What kind of .....?

How do you .....?

The best referential questions are those that are 'divergent' or 'open-ended' in that they are broad, may have multiple answers, and require a higher level of thinking from the learners.

Open-Ended/Divergent Questions

These are ideal for developing skills such as inferring, predicting, verifying and summarising, as well as eliciting more language. Open-ended questions that probe and elicit expanded thinking and processing of information are useful for involving students in deeper learning. Divergent questions have multiple possible answers and encourage students to be creative or express insight. If working in groups, students have the opportunity to learn from a variety of perspectives.

Closed/Convergent Questions

These have more narrowly defined correct answers which can be recalled from memory and require little reflection or originality. Closed questions are common in conventional tests. Closed-ended questions such as those requiring a Yes/No response, or one answer from a few possible options (multiple choice) may be useful for quickly checking comprehension. Convergent questions have one acceptable right answer; students are required to regurgitate a certain response based on conventional wisdom.

Low Risk Questions

These have no right or wrong answer. Examples include asking for students' opinions about something, or simply asking what comes into their heads when you introduce an idea or concept. These types of questions are most effective in initiating discussion.

Purposes of Questions

Questions can:

1. Help diagnose student understanding of material

2. Engage students to keep their attention and to reinforce their participation.

3. Provide a way to review, restate, emphasise, and/or summarise what is important.

4. Be used to stimulate discussion and creative and critical thinking.

5. Determine how students are thinking.

6. Help students retain material by putting into words otherwise unarticulated thoughts.

Researchers form North Carolina State University found that the following uses of question-asking were the most efficient during guided problem solving in an introductory programming course:

1. Facilitate students' comprehension and decomposition of a problem

2. Encourage planning a solution before implementation

3. Promote self-explanations

4. Reveal gaps or misconceptions in knowledge.

The purposes of questions vary at different stages during a lesson. "During the lead-in to a lesson," says Steve Darn, educator at the Izmir University of Economics, Turkey, "referential questions often form the basis for brainstorming a topic, generating interest, and introducing topic-related vocabulary." Students' responses may be recorded as a mind-map on the board, or in the form of a "what we know / what we would like to know/ what we know now" framework to get creative juices flowing.

During discussion, questions focusing on form, function, meaning, concept, and strategies may all be termed "guidance questions," and differ from comprehension questions in that learners are not necessarily required to provide correct answers. "The overall aim of these questions is to gradually raise awareness of language and skills and to help learners develop strategies for learning in a focused way," Darn says.

Effective Questioning

According to the Cornell University Center for Teaching Excellence, effective questions are meaningful and understandable to students. Depending on the level of comprehension of a topic, students may be able to handle questions of various levels of difficultly. Effective questions challenge students but are not too difficult. Students benefit from answering easier questions before difficult ones.

"Does everyone understand?" "Any other questions?" Most students will not reply, and even if they do, their answer is only a report of their own assessment of their comprehension.

Some examples of ineffective questions:

1. Too vague. Students are unsure of what is being asked and may refrain from attempting to answer.

2. Too loaded. Students may guess at what you want them to say rather than tell you what they think.

3. Too general. "Does everyone understand?" "Any other questions?" Most students will not reply, and even if they do, their answer is only a report of their own assessment of their comprehension.

4. Too closed. Yes/No questions or other closed-ended questions can be useful for drawing on previous knowledge to get started on a new topic, but are dead ends for discussions and deeper engagement.

Here's how you can design effective questions:

1. Determine the key concept you want students to learn. Refer to Bloom's Taxonomy to review levels of learning.

2. Put the question through the following filters:

Does this question draw out and work with pre-existing understandings that students bring with them?

Does this question raise the visibility of the key concepts the students are learning?

Will this question stimulate peer discussion?

Is it clear what the question is about?

3. When planning for a course, develop question strategies. Examples include an explanation strategy that asks students to explain the cause of an event or why a given situation or condition has arisen. Another strategy is an analytical question that asks students to compare and contrast situations, cases, ideas, people, or objects.

4. Determine the objectives or learning outcomes for the course. What do you want students to know or be able to do as a result of participating in your course?

5. For each learning outcome, create one or two key questions designed to provide students with the opportunity to demonstrate attainment of the learning outcome.

6. Working backwards, think of one or two questions that, when answered, lead up to the first key question you designed, and so on.

7. Prepare to start your discussion with the last questions you created and work your way toward the key questions that address the course learning outcomes.

8. Use Bloom's Taxonomy to guide your question design. Doing so will ensure that you appropriately scaffold questions starting with basic knowledge (remembering facts) to more advanced skills such as analysing or evaluating.

9. Ask short recitation questions to quickly gauge whether or not there are misconceptions and address them appropriately. Once all students are on the same level, pose more advanced questions.

10. Follow the taxonomy with flexibility. Some questions may involve multiple cognitive skill levels.

11. Minimise the use of "yes / no" questions except when checking meaning and understanding or encouraging weaker students.

12. Ask a balance of referential and display questions.

13. Use open-ended (divergent) questions to encourage opinions, elaboration, and discussion.

14. Ask questions about important rather than trivial content.

15. Grade language in questions and try not to over-paraphrase.

16. Personalise questions where possible.

17. Avoid questions that contain the answer.

18. Make sure that students clearly understand questions.

19. Give enough time for students to answer.

20. Give appropriate responses to questions, particularly where correction is required, and in order to extend the dialogue.

30 Thought-Provoking Questions to Ask Your Students:

1. What is the difference between analysing and assessing?

2. How does this tie in with what we learned before?

3. How do you know when you're right about something?

4. How would your answer be different if...?

5. What is the counterargument for that?

6. What does it take to master a subject?

7. When did you last come across something that changed the way you think?

8. What are some possible implications of this?

9. What do you think caused this to happen?

10. How would you summarise this?

11. How did you arrive at that answer?

12. What prompted you to ask that question?

13. What evidence from the text supports that claim?

14. What evidence from real life supports that claim?

15. What is the difference between this concept and that concept?

16. What's the reasoning behind your answer?

17. Can you elaborate?

18. What do we already know about this topic?

19. How important is it to be right all the time?

20. Is failure a bad thing or a good thing?

21. What makes someone a good learner?

22. What is the difference between knowledge and intelligence?

23. Do you think some people are born talented?

24. How would you use this concept in real life?

25. What is the most important part of learning?

26. Do you really know something if you can't remember it?

27. How does this concept tie into other subjects you've studied?

28. Are all smart people good test takers?

29. What's the difference between meeting and exceeding expectations?

30. What is the relationship between critical thinking and problem solving?

"English and all other natural languages have a rich vocabulary of thinking consider terms like hypothesis, reason, evidence, possibility, imagination, perspective and routine use of such words in a natural intuitive way helps students catch on to the nuances of thinking and thoughtfulness that such terms represent," says David Perkins, senior professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

"Using the language of thinking is one element of something even more important: being a model of thoughtfulness for one's students. Teachers who do not expect instant answers, who display their own honest uncertainties, who take a moment to think about 'What if' or 'What if not' or 'How else could this be done?' or 'What's the other side of the case?' express respect for the process of thought and implicitly encourage students to notice problems and opportunities and think them through."

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Socratic Questioning: 30 Thought-Provoking Questions to Ask Your Students - InformED

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Over a decade ago, cognitive scientists John D. Bransford and Daniel J. Schwartz asked fifth graders and college students to create a recovery plan to protect bald eagles from extinction. Surprisingly, the two groups came up with plans of similar quality (although the college students had better spelling skills).

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Overcoming the Fear of Being Wrong--20 Ways to Help Students

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Overcoming the Fear of Being Wrong--20 Ways to Help Students

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Like cheating on a test, ignoring a friend's phone call, wallowing in self-pity, or eating a pint of ice cream in one sitting, being wrong feels the worst when someone else is around to witness it. Unlike these things, being wrong is unjustly stigmatized as unacceptable. Everyone answers a question incorrectly now and then, but it's the shame associated with being wrong, especially in front of others, that harms us more than the fault itself.

Disappointment is a natural feeling, and more often than not drives resilience and determination. But in today's society, making the wrong decision or giving the wrong answer is associated with embarrassment, ridicule, and reduced self-worth. Even not knowing is better than being mistaken. You could drain every human brain on the planet and leave a chorus of robots chanting, "I don't know," and that would be better than animated beings expressing themselves colorfully, creatively, even eloquently-but falsely.

I'm sure many a theory could be suggested on why and how this stigma exists, but let's not concern ourselves with the past. What's important is why overcoming the fear of being wrong is a good thing, and how we can go about correcting our present attitude.

In the classroom, there are two things immediately and dramatically affected by the fear of being wrong: freedom of expression and creativity.

For fear of being wrong, many students never participate in class or ask questions. This has several negative effects on learning: 1) Because classroom environments are designed to let students learn not only from the teacher but from each other, the potential benefits of a shared learning environment are lost; 2) Because students oftentimes are wrong but are too afraid to ask questions, they never learn the right answer; 3) Because students oftentimes are right, but doubt themselves too much to volunteer, they miss out on a potentially rewarding experience.

For fear of being wrong, or simply being judged by their peers, students limit their creativity. Playing it safe and erring on the side of conformity may reduce your students' chance of rejection, but it will also reduce their chance of learning, growing, and contributing something unique to society. As Ken Robinson said, "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

Teachers suffer from the stigma as well. When it comes to trying something new in the classroom or offering a radical idea in the conference room, we have all been gripped by the fear of being wrong. But for the very same reasons students must overcome the fear, so must educators.

[Read more about The Value of Mistakes: Should it Matter How Long a Student Takes To Learn?]

Here are a few ways you can help students-and yourself- be a little braver:

1. Avoid the Fundamental Attribution Error. One of the most popular concepts in basic psychology, the Fundamental Attribution Error is the mistake people make when they attribute the cause of an outcome to a person instead of a situation. We do this to ourselves all the time, too: "I didn't get an 'A' on the math test because I am bad at math" instead of "I didn't get an 'A' on the math test because I didn't study fractions hard enough."

2. Learning has two definitions, and one is failure. We use the same word, "learn," to describe a situation in which you receive new information and a situation in which you update that information. When a high school student hears a lecture on the World Wars, he gathers new information. When he fails his mid-term test because he thought Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at the start of World War II, he corrects that information. Filling your brain with facts is a natural part of learning, and so is realizing you've been filling it with bunk.

3. Teach a lesson on it. I'm always baffled that these conversations remain in the professional sphere. Communicate this issue with your students. See what they think. Make sure they know what you think about it.

4. Always respond to an answer with more than "No." The best teachers explain why a student's answer isn't right, rather than simply telling them it isn't.

5. Look for the "right" in the "wrong." See if you can recognize traces of the right answer in a wrong answer, and encourage your student to see them too. Was she completely off track, or does she need a little nudge in the right direction?

6. Turn wrong answers into a learning experience for all. This is a great way to avoid singling out a student for being wrong. Involve the rest of the class by asking them what they think of the answer given, and encourage them to analyze it. Sometimes the "wrong" answer can lead to an even more interesting discussion than the "right" one.

7. Acknowledge students' thought processes, not just their answers. Answers don't appear in mid-air. They are arrived at after some thought has been put into a question. Helping a student understand-and correct-his own thought process can be far more beneficial than correcting the answer itself.

8. The "wrong" answer is more educational than the "right" answer. This is often the case. I've seen so many instances in which the wrong answer actually shed more light on the subject and helped students understand the topic better than when the right answer was offered up front. Express this concept to your students.

9. Don't grade participation. Most teachers include participation as some part (usually 10%) of a student's overall grade. This is a flawed, outdated system meant to scare students into participating more in class. It hardly ever works. The outspoken students will continue to be outspoken, and the shy students will continue to be shy, unless a culture of mutual respect and an environment free of judgment goes along with it.

10. Encourage creativity and innovation. A no-brainer. Indulging students in their creative impulses will demonstrate that you value them, and that students should value them too.

11. Remember that everyone is wrong sometimes. Most of the time, we don't actually witness other people being wrong about something, so, to ourselves, it seems as though we are wrong more frequently than the people around us. In reality, everyone is wrong now and then.

12. Stop treating being wrong like an anomaly. Think about this for a moment: Are we correct more often than we are incorrect? Sure, we don't mistake how to breathe or walk or converse. You remember your mother's birthday (though you don't get any credit for knowing the date). But "knowing" is just as often accompanied with "not knowing." We don't beat ourselves up for all the things we don't know (which is a lot), so why should we punish ourselves for being "wrong"? It's as much a part of our natural state of being as being "right."

13. More often than not, someone else is thinking the same thing. Have you ever had an answer to a question, remained silent, and then listened to someone else give that very same answer? Whether the someone else ended up being right or wrong, the point is you weren't alone in your thinking.

14. Imagine that you're speaking to a good friend or family member. If you know someone who wouldn't judge you for asking a certain question, then ask the question.

15. Practice doing things outside your comfort zone. This will help you trust yourself and start believing that "putting yourself out there" really doesn't come with as many risks as you once thought.

16. People respect differences more than they resent them. I've known so many people who respected me more when I spoke my mind than when I didn't. Trying to make everyone like you only works in middle school.

17. Once you form a habit, it will be easier. Let your students know that, even if they aren't comfortable speaking their mind or being wrong at first, with time it will become habit.

18. Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter. The wise words of Dr. Seuss.

19. Adopt an "abundance mentality." Although it may be a term used largely in business and sales, it applies to education as well: One failure does not mean ultimate failure. There will be many more chances to come.

20. The most intelligent people TRY to be wrong on purpose. They're called scientists. All of human advancement rests upon the principles of scientific investigation, which requires trial and error. The very best scientists try everything they can to prove themselves wrong, because they want their results to be as accurate as possible. Every one of us benefits each time someone is wrong.

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Overcoming the Fear of Being Wrong: 20 Ways To Help Your Students - InformED

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Like cheating on a test, ignoring a friend's phone call, wallowing in self-pity, or eating a pint of ice cream in one sitting, being wrong feels the worst when someone else is around to witness it. Unlike these things, being wrong is unjustly stigmatized as unacceptable.

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Awesome site!

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A Socratic Seminar is a student-led conversation with open-ended questions, careful listening, shared thoughts, and making meaning together.

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Packs A Punch As a Character Trait

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Source: Duke.
Trait increases tolerance, improves decision-making, study says.
"Intellectual humility" has been something of a wallflower among personality traits, receiving far less scholarly attention than such brash qualities as egotism or hostility. Yet this little-studied characteristic may influence people's decision-making abilities in politics, health and other arenas, says new research from Duke University.

In a time of high partisanship, intellectual humility - an awareness that one's beliefs may be wrong - is nonpartisan. Researchers measured levels of the trait, and found essentially no difference between liberals and conservatives or between religious and nonreligious people.

"There are stereotypes about conservatives and religiously conservative people being less intellectually humble about their beliefs," said lead author Mark Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. "We didn't find a shred of evidence to support that."

As defined by the authors, intellectual humility is the opposite of intellectual arrogance or conceit. In common parlance, it resembles open-mindedness. Intellectually humble people can have strong beliefs, but recognize their fallibility and are willing to be proven wrong on matters large and small, Leary said.

The researchers, whose work is featured in the March 15 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, conducted four separate studies to measure the trait and learn more about how it functions. In one study, participants read essays arguing for and against religion, and were then asked about each author's personality. After reading an essay with which they disagreed, intellectually arrogant people gave the writer low scores in morality, honesty, competence and warmth. By contrast, intellectually humble people were less likely to judge a writer's character based on his or her views.

People who displayed intellectual humility also did a better job evaluating the quality of evidence - even in mundane matters. For instance, when presented with arguments about the benefits of flossing, intellectually humble people correctly distinguished strong, fact-based arguments from weak ones.

The characteristic also affected people's views on politicians who "flip-flop." Intellectually humble Republicans were more likely than other Republicans to say that they would vote for a politician whose position on an issue changed over time, due to new evidence. They were also less likely to criticize that politician for "flip-flopping." There was less variability among Democrats: Democrats, whether intellectually arrogant or humble, were generally less likely to criticize a politician for changing his mind.

Leary said intellectual humility bears further examination.

"If you think about what's been wrong in Washington for a long time, it's a whole lot of people who are very intellectually arrogant about the positions they have, on both sides of the aisle," Leary said. "But even in interpersonal relationships, the minor squabbles we have with our friends, lovers and coworkers are often about relatively trivial things where we are convinced that our view of the world is correct and their view is wrong."

The quality has potential benefits in the business world, too, he said.

"If you're sitting around a table at a meeting and the boss is very low in intellectual humility, he or she isn't going to listen to other people's suggestions," Leary said. "Yet we know that good leadership requires broadness of perspective and taking as many perspectives into account as possible."

Leary and his co-authors suggest that intellectual humility is a quality that could be encouraged and taught. And some of their colleagues hope to do just that. Leary's team worked in collaboration with other psychologists and philosophers to refine their studies. One of those philosophers helped launch a charter school in California, the Intellectual Virtues Academy of Long Beach, aimed at promoting qualities such as intellectual humility.

Leary applauds the effort.

"Not being afraid of being wrong - that's a value, and I think it is a value we could promote," he said. "I think if everyone was a bit more intellectually humble we'd all get along better, we'd be less frustrated with each other."

About this psychology research article

Funding: The research was supported by a grant from the Templeton Foundation.

Source: Jill Rosen - Duke
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from the Duke press release.
Original Research: Abstract for "Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility" by Mark R. Leary, Kate J. Diebels, Erin K. Davisson, Katrina P. Jongman-Sereno, Jennifer C. Isherwood, Kaitlin T. Raimi, Samantha A. Deffler, and Rick H. Hoylein Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Published online March 17 2017 doi:10.1177/0146167217697695

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

Abstract Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility
Four studies examined intellectual humility-the degree to which people recognize that their beliefs might be wrong. Using a new Intellectual Humility (IH) Scale, Study 1 showed that intellectual humility was associated with variables related to openness, curiosity, tolerance of ambiguity, and low dogmatism. Study 2 revealed that participants high in intellectual humility were less certain that their beliefs about religion were correct and judged people less on the basis of their religious opinions. In Study 3, participants high in intellectual humility were less inclined to think that politicians who changed their attitudes were "flip-flopping," and Study 4 showed that people high in intellectual humility were more attuned to the strength of persuasive arguments than those who were low. In addition to extending our understanding of intellectual humility, this research demonstrates that the IH Scale is a valid measure of the degree to which people recognize that their beliefs are fallible.

"Cognitive and Interpersonal Features of Intellectual Humility" by Mark R. Leary, Kate J. Diebels, Erin K. Davisson, Katrina P. Jongman-Sereno, Jennifer C. Isherwood, Kaitlin T. Raimi, Samantha A. Deffler, and Rick H. Hoylein Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Published online March 17 2017 doi:10.1177/0146167217697695

Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.

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For A Modest Personality Trait, 'Intellectual Humility' Packs A Punch

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Source: Duke. Trait increases tolerance, improves decision-making, study says. "Intellectual humility" has been something of a wallflower among personality traits, receiving far less scholarly attention than such brash qualities as egotism or hostility. Yet this little-studied characteristic may influence people's decision-making abilities in politics, health and other arenas, says new research from Duke University.

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50 Great Teachers: Socrates, The Ancient World’s Teaching Superstar

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It’s been 2,400 years since he taught his last class, but the teaching method Socrates created, and that bears his name, lives on today.

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Library of Congress

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Copy of Questions, Agency, and Democracy

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Using Questions to Invite Wonder and Empathy by Shanna Peeples

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PART I. Building a Questioning Classroom Culture

1. Kids These Days: Creating Deeper Learning Experiences Framed Around Student Questions

2. Designing for Engagement: Strategies for Using Student Questions to Plan Academic Discussions

3. Teaching Like Socrates: Composing a Classroom Climate to Encourage Inquiry

4. Learning to Listen: Processes to Support Better Thinking Through Focused Attention

5. Constructing Trust: Foundational Practices to Build Empathy, Belonging, and a Culture of Thinking

PART II. Curating Questions for Use in the Content Areas

6. Using Questions in Multiple Disciplines and Grade Levels

9. Social Studies, Government, and Humanities

11. Career and Technical Education

PART III. Applying Inquiry to Do Real Work in the Real World

13. Using Student Questions for Project Ideas at All Levels

PART IV. Using Our Own Questions to Transform Our Practice

14. Using Teacher Questions to Guide Staff Meetings and Plan Professional Development

APPENDIX: RESOURCES, RECOMMENDED TEXTS, AND RUBRICS

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PART I. Building a Questioning Classroom Culture 1. Kids These Days: Creating Deeper Learning Experiences Framed Around Student Questions 2. Designing for Engagement: Strategies for Using Student Questions to Plan Academic Discussions 3. Teaching Like Socrates: Composing a Classroom Climate to Encourage Inquiry 4. Learning to Listen: Processes to Support Better Thinking Through Focused Attention 5.

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15 Ways to Engage Students in Meaningful Discussions in Person and Online - Amanda Write Now

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There are so many discussion tech tools available to teachers these days! Parlay, Jamboard, Back Channel, Voxer and even Google Slides and Docs can be used to facilitate discussions among students virtually. But, what always gets

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Resource for Literature and Shared Inquiry

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Big Ideas in Popular Culture
Depaul University Conference Center, Downtown Chicago May 4-6, 2018
The great ideas are all around us! Across music, film, and television, popular culture is a rich source of compelling writing on ideas central to our modern world. We know you'll enjoy diving into this treasure trove of human expression and discussing the vibrant and provocative short stories, poems, memoirs, essays, and journalism in these volumes.

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The Great Books Foundation | Inspiring ideas, dialogue, and lives

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Depaul University Conference Center, Downtown Chicago May 4-6, 2018 The great ideas are all around us! Across music, film, and television, popular culture is a rich source of compelling writing on ideas central to our modern world.

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For those who aren't familiar with the concept, a Socratic Seminar is a classroom discussion that focuses on big ideas and involves all students. It is basically the antithesis of a lecture-instead of transmitting knowledge from teacher to student(s), we are instead sharing our ideas through dialogue. Not debate, but dialogue. We are not covering a topic, or focusing on subject matter, we are exploring these things. We are not looking for right answers, and we are not looking to change anyone's mind. We want to extend ideas, explore thoughts, and work collectively to think more deeply about those big ideas.

Seminars are generally based on a text, and at times, we will use a text. More often, however, I will set up our discussion based on a particular artwork. Read on to see how I set up and run Socratic Seminars in my art room and why I think they're so important.

Setting Up the Classroom

Students should be set up in a circle. My tables are in a 'U' shape, and that works well enough. The important part is that everyone can see and hear each other, so each student feels comfortable being a part of the seminar.

Setting Up the Discussion

I will find an artwork to discuss that either has an ambiguous meaning, or a deep meaning that is worth discussing at length. Probably my favorite is the etching Minotauromachia by Picasso, but it's tough to go wrong-especially if your kids are used to talking about work.

After selecting the artwork, I choose a big idea (from the list of 103 great ideas from Mortimer Adler). This big idea will begin and guide our discussion. Within this idea, you should be looking for 3 things.

1. Ideas, Issues, and Values -Find some that are worth talking about.

2. Ambiguity -Your big idea should allow for multiple positions, ideas and opinions.

3. Accessibility-Choose an idea that is interesting for your students. It really, really helps if you are interested in it as well. If you are curious and inquisitive your students will be too.

Conducting the Discussion

Using the big idea, I will begin with an opening question. This question WILL NOT have a right answer. It should reference the artwork (or text) we are using, and have students explore the deeper meaning of the work. Often times, this is a good spot to use some higher-order thinking skills. For example, you could ask, "After looking at the artwork, please rank these pairs of emotions according to their relevance to the work: Courage v. Despair, Love v. Fear, and Respect v. Pity."

From there, it's all about simply guiding the discussion. When you run a Socratic Seminar, you are both the leader and a participant. You will ask the questions that get them talking, and you will talk yourself, but make sure you have these things in mind:

Silence is OK! Taking time to think and formulate responses is important.

Keep the discussion focused on the art.

Ask follow-up questions. Paraphrase, probe and make students expand ideas.

Help clarify if answers or thoughts get bogged down, confused, or vague.

Involve reluctant students, and move away from those who dominate the discussion.

Now, one opening question and a few follow-ups will generally not give you an entire class period of discussion. This is especially true when you are in the first few seminars of the year. To move things along, I go to a "How" or "Why" question-anything open-ended that can keep the conversation going strong. For example, you could ask, "Why do you think Picasso chose the minotaur for this work? How could that be representative of a bigger idea?"

If the conversation really stalls, I like to use some generic questions like asking students' opinions, having them come up with some kind of hypothesis, putting themselves in the artist's shoes, etc. Anything that you feel is worth discussing probably is worth discussing. Just put a little bit of thought and planning into the questions you will ask before you get started.

Learning Together

Socratic Seminars are not something you can jump right into. It takes time for both you and your students to learn to do them well. The beauty is that you can learn together. Each time you conduct a seminar, you will learn what kinds of questions to ask to draw out reasoning and explanations from your students and your students will learn how to speak, read, listen, observe and defend opinions without debate.

It can take quite a few class periods to get to the point of seamless seminars, but I feel like it's a great way to study art history, especially for my advanced students who have some prior knowledge.

Because of Socratic Seminars, my students are better at analyzing, communicating, thinking, and speaking-all skills that we, as art teachers, would likely say are beneficial. Most importantly, I am of the opinion that the critical thinking, original thoughts, and initiative that are developed in these seminars help my students become better artists. And that's the goal I'm really after.

Have you ever tried a Socratic Seminar in your art room? What are some of the other types of discussions and critiques that take place in your room?

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How to Conduct Socratic Seminars in the Art Room - The Art of Ed

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For those who aren't familiar with the concept, a Socratic Seminar is a classroom discussion that focuses on big ideas and involves all students. It is basically the antithesis of a lecture-instead of transmitting knowledge from teacher to student(s), we are instead sharing our ideas through dialogue. Not debate, but dialogue.

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Reading Like A Historian

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The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features a set of primary documents designed for groups of students with a range of reading skills.

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How to Thrive!

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When Zeno of Cyprus was shipwrecked and stranded on Athens, he wasn't expecting any good to happen.

Having lost everything and with not much else to do, Zeno wandered into a bookshop and was quickly absorbed by the teachings of Socrates. After studying with the great philosophers of his time, he decided to impart his wisdom to anyone who would care to listen.

Thus the philosophy of Stoicism was born. Zeno's teachings would quickly spread and would be adopted by both slaves and kings alike. As he would later joke: "I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered shipwreck."

But that's not where the story of Stoicism ends. Centuries later, the philosophy remains as relevant - if not more so - in modern society. These stoic practices will help bring calm to the chaos we face today.

1. Develop An Internal Locus Of Control

"Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them." - Epictetus

Much of what happens in life is not within our control. The Stoics recognised this undeniable truth, and focused instead on what they could do.

Born a slave, it would seem that Epictetus had no reason to believe he could control anything. He was permanently crippled from a broken leg given to him by his master. Epictetus would live and die in poverty.

But that wasn't what Epictetus thought. He would say that even while his property and even his body was not within his control, his opinions, desires, and aversions still remained his. That was something that he owned.

It's easy to get frustrated today. We're so used to comfort that even the slightest inconvenience provokes outrage within us. If the internet takes a second longer than it should or if traffic stalls for a minute, the natural instinct is annoyance if not rage.

It isn't any of these breakdowns that are making us unhappy. The unhappiness stems from the emotional response that we have chosen. The onus is on ourselves to ensure that we don't let external events affect our internal state of mind.

Once we internalise that, it becomes clear that we have the power to be happy regardless of our circumstances.

2. Guard Your Time

"We're tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers." - Seneca

The Stoics understood that time is our greatest asset. Unlike any of our material possessions, once lost, time can never be regained. We must therefore strive to waste as little of it as possible.

Those who squander this scarce resource on minutia or entertainment will find that they have nothing to show for it in the end. The habit of procrastination and putting things off will come back to haunt us. Tomorrow isn't guaranteed.

On the other hand, those who give away their time freely to others will also find that they are no better than those who waste it. Most of us allow people and other obligations to impose on our time too easily. We make commitments without giving deep thought to what it entails. Calendars and schedules were meant to help us. We should not become a slave to them.

Regardless of which end of the spectrum we fall into, time is of the essence. We think we have a lot of time, but we really don't.

3. Don't Outsource Your Happiness

"I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others." - Marcus Aurelius

Much of what we do stems from our primal need to be liked and accepted by others. Disapproval from our social group had serious repercussions in the past. It would have likely meant exile and eventually death in the wilderness.

That's still true to some extent today. But how much time and effort do we spend trying to win the approval of others? What is it costing us?

We spend money we don't have, to buy fancy things we don't need, in order to impress someone we don't care about. Our choice of career or lifestyle is centred around how others perceive us, rather than what is best for us. We are held hostage and pay a king's ransom every day, with no guarantee that we will ever be free.

In contrast, the Roman statesman Cato sought to lead a life that was independent of the opinion of others. He would wear the most outlandish of outfits and walk in the streets without putting on shoes. It was his way of accustoming himself to be ashamed only of what deserves shame, and to despise all other sorts of disgrace.

That was the only way in which he could stand up to Julius Caesar, whom he recognised was consolidating too much power. It enabled him to make the big decisions when it counted, without fear of disapproval.

We have much to learn from him. Far better for us to live life on our own terms and ignore the opinions of others. Happiness should never be outsourced.

4. Stay Focused When Confronted With Distractions

"If a person doesn't know to which port they sail, no wind is favourable." - Seneca

Modern-day capitalism has given us an abundance of options.

Whether it's food, travel, or entertainment, we have far more to work with than our predecessors did. Yet, this hasn't clearly benefited us. When presented with so many options, we become paralysed by indecision.

This is known as the paradox of choice. Our brains haven't been able to keep up with modern day advances and are overwhelmed when presented with so much information. Because it's so difficult to make a choice, the default choice is to maintain the status quo.

It's one of the core problems we face in our daily lives. With so many options, we never really commit to a path. We either put off making a decision or pursue multiple activities all at once. The result is that we never really make headway into anything at all.

The Stoics emphasised the need for purposeful action. We must take care not to be merely reacting to our circumstances, but to live intentionally.

5. Toss Away Ego And Vanity

"Throw out your conceited opinions, for it is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows." - Epictetus

One of Epictetus' biggest frustrations as a teacher was how his students claimed to be want to be taught, but secretly believed that they knew everything.

It's a pain all teachers know and most of us would recognise. At the heart of it is ego and arrogance. The thought is that we've learnt enough and are better than our contemporaries.

Nowhere is such thinking more dangerous than today.

The information of today is not only insufficient for solving the problems of tomorrow but can very well be the obstacle for sharper thinking as well.We are in an age where we're merely one step away from being disrupted in virtually every industry. Even in ancient times Marcus Aurelius has remarked, "the universe is change, life is an opinion".

This is why the most brilliant minds of today spend a good portion of their time reading. They understand that there is always wisdom to be gleaned, whether from the past, present, or future.

We would be wise to do the same. Always stay a student.

6. Consolidate Your Thoughts In Writing

"No man was ever wise by chance" - Seneca

Of the many things we can do daily, none are as important as looking inward. The act of self-reflection forces us to question ourselves and examine our own assumptions of the world. It's how the answers to some of the world's biggest questions have surfaced.

Keeping a journal remains one of the most effective ways for mindfulness. It boosts creativity, increases gratitude, and serves as therapy all at once. The benefits are numerous. Your thoughts and feelings become clearer in writing than in your mind.

The Stoics were well aware of that. The most powerful man in the Roman empire, Marcus Aurelius would dutifully take the time to record his observations and feelings whether at war or in peace. It's what we know today as Meditations.

While everyone from athletes to entrepreneurs benefit from Marcus Aurelius' wisdom today, it is clear that the biggest beneficiary of his writing and thinking was himself. The clarity of thought and accountability brought by his journal kept him virtuous when anyone in his position would have likely erred and become a tyrant.

Take the time to journal. It's not difficult and the rewards are immense.

7. Stand Your Ground

"In doing nothing men learn to do evil." - Cato

In a profession that is often based on compromise, Cato was stubborn and steadfast in his beliefs. He was taught that there were no shades of grey. All virtues were one and the same virtue, all vices the same vice.

It seems like an unreasonably high standard. It's undeniable that many feats have only been made possible through compromise. Yet it seems that the pendulum has swung too far today: we forgo our principles in the name of tolerance or for profit.

Cato infuriated both his political allies and enemies for his sheer refusal to compromise. He demanded that his friends and family adopt the same stance, without leaving room for any flexibility. But adherence to this impossible standard also earned him unshakable authority. By default, he became Rome's moral arbiter of right and wrong.

We can't all be like him, but there is a lesson to be learnt. If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for everything.

8. Imagine The Worst That Could Happen

"Nothing happens to the wise man against his expectation" - Seneca

Much has been said about the power of positive thinking in recent times. We are taught that optimism and affirmations are the key to leading a happier life. But that's not what the Stoics believed.

They felt that this practice invited passivity into our daily lives. It encourages us to simply hope for things to get better instead of taking concrete action. Rather than deny the harsh realities of life, they decided to embrace it.

They regularly conducted an exercise known as premeditatio malorum, which translates to a premeditation of evils. The goal was to imagine the worst events that could possibly happen to them. For some, it was a loss of reputation. To others, it was financial ruin and poverty. But common to all was the eventuality of death.

What would things look like if everything went wrong tomorrow?

How would I cope with that situation?

Should this change the way I live today?

These were some of the questions they asked themselves. The exercise never failed to yield valuable rewards. The Stoics took cautionary measures to ensure that the undesirable outcome would not eventuate. Even when it failed, they lived better for they had contemplated how they would weather the adversity they were faced with.

We should be brutally honest with ourselves and never be afraid to confront reality. That is the best way we can prepare for success and be ready for failure.

9. Remember That Nothing Endures

"Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both." - Marcus Aurelius

In the grand scheme of things, none of what we've achieved matters.

It's a sobering thought. We all experience the world like we are at the centre of reality. That creates an illusion where our importance is inflated. We see ourselves as the protagonist in our own story.

But the truth is this perception exists only in our minds. Everyone around us walks around with a similar mindset, but each of us are insignificant in the long run. Even the brightest minds such as Edison and Newton would eventually be relegated to a footnote.

There is no need for us to conform to irrational expectations and external pressures. Neither do we need to chase accomplishments in the hope of building a legacy. None of us these things last.

All that matters is we live life on our own terms. It is the only way we can truly say that we have lived a good life.

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9 Stoic Practices That Will Help You Thrive In The Madness Of Modernity

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When Zeno of Cyprus was shipwrecked and stranded on Athens, he wasn't expecting any good to happen. Having lost everything and with not much else to do, Zeno wandered into a bookshop and was quickly absorbed by the teachings of Socrates.

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from the Character Lab

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When you approach life with intellectual humility, you open your mind to learning. You are able to learn from opposing views and have more constructive discussions, even when you disagree. No matter how old you are, with intellectual humility you become wiser.

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The Story of Stories

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Why is my friend late? How does nuclear fission work? What occurs when I sneeze? We all need to understand why certain things happen. Some researchers think the drive to explain the world is a basic human impulse, similar to thirst or hunger.

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Yes, Some Questions Are Better Than Others

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Yes, Some Questions Are Better Than Others

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from NPR

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To appreciate that some questions are better than others, it helps to consider a few examples of questions that are bad.

To find them, try playing Twenty Questions with a young child. In trying to guess an animal, a young child might ask: Is it a koala? Is it an elephant? (Not: Is it a mammal? Does it live in Africa?) These are bad questions in the sense that they're unlikely to yield an efficient solution to the problem of discovering the animal one's adversary has chosen.

In the simplified world of Twenty Questions, it's relatively easy to evaluate what makes a question good or bad. Unfortunately, generating good questions in the real world is often a more complicated affair.

For one thing, we don't always have a single, well-defined goal. When we do have some practical goal, being clear about what it is can be a first step towards asking better questions. An article for business people, for example, suggests that in asking questions, it's important to figure out whether you're hoping to affirm what you think you know or to discover something new. A resource for educators urges teachers to recognize the cognitive skill they want their question to target: comprehension, application, synthesis, and so on.

But when our aim isn't to achieve some practical goal, like growing a business or teaching some skill, things become murkier still. What, for example, is a good question for basic science? What kind of question promotes self-discovery or insight? And how can we learn to ask better questions in cases like these?

Scientist David Stork suggests that just as we teach problem solving, we should teach "question posing" - the art of asking good questions, the questions that lead to further insight and discovery. Asking big, bold, exploratory questions isn't always an activity that's rewarded in adulthood. From preschool to high school, children move away from questions motivated by intrinsic wonder to those motivated by potential applications. Rather than merely "executing an act of curiosity" (to borrow a phrase from Dan Moulthrop), they're often after the solution to some practical problem.

A first step towards asking better questions, then, might be to recognize the intellectual contribution of a question well posed, not just a question well answered. Philosopher Justin Weinberg argues that when it comes to answering questions, philosophy has a terrible track record. But when it comes to creating new questions, philosophy has achieved a great deal - not least the conception of fields like physics, logic, and psychology, fields that have gone on to answer some of the questions first posed by philosophers.

Weinberg goes on to identify some of the ways that philosophy goes about creating new questions:

Reinvention - bringing attention to a forgotten or neglected question by asking it in a new way.

Application - reformulating a version of a known philosophical question so as to apply it to a new domain and, in doing so, bringing new considerations into play.

Specification - showing that a known philosophical question is ambiguous or incomplete by making relevant distinctions and articulating the other questions whose answers are needed in order to clarify or complete the first one.

Inauguration - asking a question that creates a new area of philosophical inquiry.

These categories aren't restricted to philosophy. In science and in everyday life, we might similarly consider how a new question reinvents, applies, specifies or inaugurates in a fruitful way.

And we might do well to recapture some of the youthful exuberance of young children's questions - not necessarily by asking about koalas and elephants (though that's sometimes fine, too), but by letting some of our questions be guided by our basic curiosity, not only by our immediate goals.
Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

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Yes, Some Questions Are Better Than Others

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To appreciate that some questions are better than others, it helps to consider a few examples of questions that are bad. To find them, try playing Twenty Questions with a young child. In trying to guess an animal, a young child might ask: Is it a koala? Is it an elephant?

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Watch 4th Graders Make Maps Before & After Asking Questions (QFT)

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Watch 4th Graders Make Maps Before & After Asking Questions (QFT)

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The QFT for Primary Source Learning in a Nevada 4th Grade Classroom - YouTube

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If playback doesn’t begin shortly, try restarting your device.

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Is Curiosity a Positive or Negative Feeling? 

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Is Curiosity a Positive or Negative Feeling? 

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Yes! From NPR

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Curiosity is a familiar feeling among people.

But as soon as we scrutinize that feeling, curiosity reveals itself to be a complex emotion indeed. Just ask yourself: Is curiosity a positive feeling or a negative feeling? Is it more like frustration or more like anticipation? Is it a painful reminder of what we don't (yet) know, or a thrilling beacon towards what we might soon discover?

Actually, curiosity can be all of these things - and more. Like lust, curiosity has positive and negative faces: one pointed (with happy anticipation!) towards what we desire, one pointed (with cruel frustration!) towards what we have not yet obtained - and may never obtain.

But unlike lust, the object of curiosity's desire is information. Curiosity is all about learning what we do not (yet) know.

Of course, not all feelings of curiosity are the same. Curiosity can be more or less pleasurable, more or less aggravating. So what accounts for this variation? Do some situations elicit more pleasurable forms of curiosity than others?

Psychologists have been curious about this question, and their curiosity is starting to pay off. A paper by Marret Noordewier and Eric van Dijk, published in May in the journal Cognition and Emotion, reveals one of the factors that affects the balance of negative and positive when it comes curiosity. That factor is time.

If you're curious to hear more, consider first what some theories of curiosity tell us about curiosity itself.

One of the most prominent theories of curiosity, the information-gap model, suggests that curiosity arises when a person notices a gap in her knowledge. The gap induces a feeling of deficiency, which in turn motivates her to fill the gap. Like hunger or thirst, curiosity can thus be aversive; an emotional prod to obtain information. Perhaps the bigger or more consequential the gap, the more aversive the feeling.

Other accounts of curiosity build in a distinction between its more negative and positive faces. On one view, curiosity comes in two flavors: deprivation - a strong but unsatisfied need to know - and interest - information-seeking that's motivated by anticipated pleasure. These two flavors reflect the changing balance of "wanting" (what we need) versus "liking" (what we enjoy).

Once we recognize that curiosity has many faces - not all of them equally pleasurable - we can consider what affects the nature of our experience in a given case. The paper by Noordewier and van Dijk does just this for the dimension of time. The researchers ask: Is the experience of curiosity more likely to be positive when we anticipate that our curiosity will be satisfied sooner rather than later?

To answer this question, the researchers conducted three studies with a total of over 200 participants recruited from a university or online. In each study, the researchers first induced a state of curiosity by telling people that they would later watch a video that contained "something with different shades of brown." Participants were invited to reflect on what it might be, but they were not told. (I will tell you what it is, dear reader, but not until the end.)

Crucially, half the people were told they they would watch the video after a short delay of only one minute, and half were told that there would first be a 30-minute delay during which they would complete other interesting tasks. At the start of this delay, everyone indicated how curious they felt about the content of the video, as well as how much they felt negative feelings, such as discomfort, versus positive feelings, such as happiness.

The key finding was that while both groups reported equal levels of curiosity, the curiosity was accompanied by more negative feelings for those participants facing a long versus a short delay. Moreover, these negative feelings weren't simply a consequence of learning about the additional 30-minutes worth of tasks - in two of the experiments, all volunteers expected the experiment to last the same amount of time, so what varied was only the order of the tasks, and hence the delay between learning about the video and getting to watch it.

The researchers argue that these findings shed light on the two faces of curiosity. When our curiosity will not be satisfied anytime soon, we focus on not knowing, on the information gap itself, and this is largely aversive. But when our curiosity is on the verge of being satisfied, we focus on almost knowing, or the anticipated resolution, which is a more positive experience. On this view, the two faces of curiosity reflect different blends of not knowing versus almost knowing.

Generalizing beyond psychology experiments to curiosity in science, we might expect the experience of curiosity to similarly depend upon whether we expect our curiosity to be satisfied at all. In science, we routinely encounter questions that might not be answered in our lifetimes, let alone in 30 minutes. Perhaps the culture of science helps buffer scientists from the aversive face of curiosity, or perhaps scientists are more likely to be people who experience curiosity as a positive motivator rather than an aversive prod. These are interesting questions for future research.

For now, you can ask yourself how you fared with curiosity over a brief delay. Remember the video showing "something with different shades of brown"? Has not knowing what the video is about made you uneasy? Has knowing that you'll soon find out filled you with happy anticipation?

As promised, the answer is this: The video featured Siberian Grizzly bears.
Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

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Is Curiosity A Positive Or Negative Feeling?

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Curiosity is a familiar feeling among people. But as soon as we scrutinize that feeling, curiosity reveals itself to be a complex emotion indeed. Just ask yourself: Is curiosity a positive feeling or a negative feeling? Is it more like frustration or more like anticipation?

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How (And When) to Think Like a Philosopher

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How (And When) to Think Like a Philosopher

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from NPR

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As an undergraduate, I majored in philosophy - a purportedly useless major, except that it teaches you how to think, write and speak.

The skills I was learning from working through papers and arguments extended well beyond the coursework itself, yielding habitual patterns of reasoning that made me a more discerning scientist, a more careful writer and a better thinker all around. Within and beyond philosophy, I was learning to spot poor arguments, uncover hidden assumptions, tease out subtle implications and recognize false dichotomies. (It was around this time that my then boyfriend, now husband, jokingly gifted me a modified light box with a button that I could press to light up the damning message: "Distinction blurred!")

Of course, good thinking isn't the sole province of philosophy. Training in any discipline or area of expertise teaches you habits of mind that - hopefully - lead to better performance in that domain. But philosophy is unusual in its explicit focus on the structure of arguments across a broad range of topics, from the meaning of words to the nature of knowledge, from ethics to animal minds. It makes sense, then, that training in philosophy might be unusual in its potential to yield general-purpose tools for better thinking.

So what do these tools for better thinking look like?

In a new article published in Aeon, philosopher Alan Hájek presents a "philosophy tool kit," sharing some common philosophical moves that apply both within and beyond academic philosophy. What Hájek offers isn't logic or probability theory (though that's useful, too), but rather common heuristics or "rules of thumb" that help philosophers quickly identify problematic claims or assumptions. These heuristics are intended to make difficult reasoning tasks easier for the philosophically untrained, though Hájek is clear that "there are no shortcuts to profundity" - the tools are a starter set, not a complete kit nor blueprints for the construction of worthwhile arguments.

Several of Hájek's tools involve questioning assumptions in the way a claim or question is posed. For instance, asking what the right thing to do is presupposes that there is a single right thing to do. In some cases, that presupposition is wrong: There could be no right thing to do, or there could be many right things to do. Encountering "the" should therefore set off a minor alarm, prompting you to consider whether the presupposition is warranted.

A second tool comes in handy when evaluating a claim that is supposed to apply to many cases. Here it's appropriate to look for counterexamples that might disconfirm or limit the scope of the claim, but where might such counterexamples be found? It's often effective to consider extreme or "edge" cases. For instance, in considering whether there are counterexamples to the claim that everything has a cause, one might consider what caused the first cause, or the set of all causes. As a more pedestrian example, evaluating the claim that "everyone likes a good book" might prompt you to consider extremes in age (do newborns like a good book?) or kinds of people (do supervillains like a good book?).

For additional tools, and a more complete exposition, readers are encouraged to read Hájek's article. But I want to end with a final reflection for readers of 13.7. If these thinking tools are so useful, why do we need special training to acquire them? Why aren't they built into our cognitive machinery, or acquired through our years of experience evaluating claims and arguments in everyday life?

Hájek identifies one reason in his discussion of what he calls the "contrastive-stress heuristic": We fall prey to various cognitive biases that can lead us astray. One example is confirmation bias, the tendency to seek and favor evidence that supports, rather than challenges, the hypotheses we (prefer to) believe. A strategy like systematically considering alternative possibilities - common to both philosophical and scientific thinking - is useful, in part, because it helps overcome this bias.

But here's a second (and more speculative) hypothesis for why many habits of philosophical thinking might not come naturally. The hypothesis is that some tools for critical evaluation run counter to another valuable set of tools: our tools for effective social engagement. These tools help us make sense of what someone is saying by encouraging us to interpret underspecified claims in the most positive light; they help us coordinate conversation by establishing common ground.

When someone asks us for "the right thing to do," we're inclined to engage in the conversation they've invited us to engage in: one in which we assume there is a right thing to do, and we help them to find it. When someone says "everyone likes a good book," we understand them to be telling us something about the kinds of people relevant to our current conversational context, not something true of every single person.

If this is right, then some forms of critical evaluation and philosophical thinking are hard because they force us to suspend other habits of mind; habits that serve us well when our goal is to engage or persuade or befriend, but less well when our goal is to arrive at a precise characterization of what's true, or of what follows from what. The trick, then, is not only to acquire Hájek's philosophy tool kit, but to know when to use it.
Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

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How (And When) To Think Like A Philosopher

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As an undergraduate, I majored in philosophy - a purportedly useless major, except that it teaches you how to think, write and speak. The skills I was learning from working through papers and arguments extended well beyond the coursework itself, yielding habitual patterns of reasoning that made me a more discerning scientist, a more careful writer and a better thinker all around.

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from NPR

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Calling someone a "skeptic" can be a term of praise or condemnation.

Too often, it expresses approval when the target of skepticism is a claim we reject, and disapproval when the target is a claim we hold dear. I might praise skepticism towards homeopathic medicine, but disdain skepticism towards human evolution. Someone with a very different set of beliefs might praise skepticism regarding the moon landing, but disdain skepticism regarding the existence of God.

Sometimes, though, skepticism is taken to be a healthy attitude towards belief - a characteristic that we might praise regardless of its target. Skepticism is supposed to reflect a willingness to question and doubt - a key characteristic of scientific thinking. Skepticism encourages us to look at the evidence critically; it allows for the possibility that we are wrong. It seems like a win, then, to learn that courses in skepticism can decrease belief in the paranormal or - as reported in an article forthcoming in Science & Education - that teaching students to think critically about history can decrease belief in pseudoscience and other unwarranted claims.

But taken too far, skepticism misses its mark. It's important to avoid the error of believing something we ought not to believe, but it's also important to avoid the error of failing to believe that which we should. If the aim is to detect signal - and not merely to reject noise - then an educational win would require greater differentiation between warranted and unwarranted claims, not merely rejection of the unwarranted. This point is sometimes lost in praising skepticism and skeptical thinking, with its emphasis on what we reject rather than what we uphold.

It's important to say that this isn't intended as a criticism of the skeptical movement or of skeptical philosophy, both of which endorse more nuanced versions of what skepticism entails. It is, however, a criticism of the way skepticism (as used in casual conversation) is sometimes held up as a virtue in itself. The virtues we should really be upholding - and for which skepticism is only an oblique guide - are what I'll call truth-tracking and humility.

Truth-tracking is about getting things right: identifying the signal amidst the noise. We don't want to be fooled by noise (about a link between vaccines and autism, for example), but we also don't want to miss out on signal (about the real benefits of vaccination). Truth-tracking isn't (only) about rejecting noise, but about differentiating signal from noise.

Humility is about recognizing the possibility for error, and therefore holding beliefs tentatively (or " defeasibly"). But recognizing uncertainty doesn't mean that all bets are off. Some bets are still much better than other bets. You don't know who will win the next horserace, for example, but that doesn't mean that you'd assign equal probabilities to all contenders. Similarly, we can quantify uncertainty by assigning degrees of belief to different propositions. I might think that life on other planets is unlikely, and that ESP is unlikely, yet assign a much higher probability to the former than to the latter. Similarly, I might think that rain tomorrow and human evolution are highly likely, but assign a much higher probability to the latter than to the former. Quantifying uncertainty allows us to hold even strong beliefs with a modicum of doubt, while simultaneously recognizing that they're far more likely than the alternatives we defeasibly reject.

Skepticism is a poor proxy for truth-tracking and humility. It gets us half of truth-tracking (rejecting noise), and it gets us some of humility (questioning and doubt). What it doesn't get us is signal with degrees of belief or - more ambitiously - truth in an uncertain world. That seems like a more praiseworthy aim to me.
Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

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Calling someone a "skeptic" can be a term of praise or condemnation. Too often, it expresses approval when the target of skepticism is a claim we reject, and disapproval when the target is a claim we hold dear. I might praise skepticism towards homeopathic medicine, but disdain skepticism towards human evolution.

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The Selective Laziness of Human Reasoning 

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The Selective Laziness of Human Reasoning 

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from NPR

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Democrat: "Those arguments by Republicans are preposterous!"

Republican: "Those arguments by Democrats are absurd!"

Sound familiar?

There are plenty of reasons why political disputes can be divisive, and a host of psychological mechanisms that contribute to a preference for one's own views.

For one thing, political preferences aren't just reasoned opinions; they're often markers of personal and cultural identity with strong emotional resonance. For another, we tend to expose ourselves to sources that support our own views, reinforcing rather than challenging our beliefs.

An article forthcoming in the journal Cognitive Science adds another mechanism into the mix: We're more critical of arguments offered by others than of those we produce ourselves. Authors Emmanuel Trouche, Petter Johansson, Lars Hall and Hugo Mercier describe this as the "selective laziness of reasoning." We reserve effortful scrutiny for others and often give ourselves a free pass.

To test this idea, the researchers exploited a phenomenon known as choice blindness: Under the right conditions, many people fail to recognize that a choice they made previously has been swapped with an alternative. For example, people who choose one of two photographs as more attractive will often fail to notice when the photograph they're subsequently presented isn't the one they chose, and will nonetheless go on to explain why they found the (non-chosen) option more attractive. The phenomenon has been replicated for choices in a variety of domains, including jam and tea preferences, moral judgments and political attitudes.

Trouche and colleagues adapted this technique to the case of arguments and, in so doing, created situations in which people were asked to evaluate arguments that they didn't recognize as their own. This revealed that people were willing to generate arguments that - when presented as coming from another person - they could readily recognize as flawed.

Here's how it worked. Across two studies, more than 400 participants recruited online were presented with word problems that required them to draw inferences from limited information. For example, they might read about a fruit and vegetable shop that carries apples as well as other products and learn that none of the apples are organic. They would then be asked what follows "for sure" from this information, and were given a variety of options to choose from: that all the fruits are organic (false), that none of the fruits are organic (unknown), that some of the fruits are not organic (true), and so on. Participants made a selection and provided an argument to justify their choice.

In a subsequent phase of the experiment, participants were presented with the same problems, along with choices and arguments purportedly provided by other participants. In each case the choice was presented as an alternative to what the participant had selected initially, and participants were invited to reconsider their own choice in light of the argument.

But within this set was a fake: a problem for which the participant's original choice had been swapped, such that the "alternative" response was the one that the participant had actually provided, and the corresponding argument was the participant's own. About half of participants failed to notice the swap: They were the victims of choice blindness. For these participants, the experimenters succeeded in creating the conditions they were after, putting people in the position of evaluating arguments they had produced as if they had been produced by someone else.

And what they found was this: that people rejected their own arguments over 50 percent of the time, failing to find them sufficiently compelling to change what they thought was their initial response. In other words, people were less critical of the very same arguments when they produced them themselves than when they were later presented as coming from another person. Evaluating these arguments also led to an overall improvement in performance: Accuracy increased from around 40 percent in the initial phase to around 60 percent after participants evaluated their own argument in disguise.

There are several ways to interpret these results. The authors of the study take them as evidence for a theory according to which human reasoning is principally geared towards effective argumentation rather than knowledge-seeking. But for present purposes, we can draw a timely, if more modest, conclusion: that when it comes to evaluating arguments across the political spectrum - especially those that challenge our own views - we would do well to bear in mind the selective laziness of reasoning.

It makes sense to evaluate other people's arguments with careful scrutiny, but we should apply the same consideration to our own.
Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

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The Selective Laziness Of Human Reasoning

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Democrat: "Those arguments by Republicans are preposterous!" Republican: "Those arguments by Democrats are absurd!" Sound familiar? There are plenty of reasons why political disputes can be divisive, and a host of psychological mechanisms that contribute to a preference for one's own views.

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Are Stories a Key to Human Intelligence?

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Are Stories a Key to Human Intelligence?

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from NPR

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In a talk in Pittsburgh in 1997, the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould allegedly characterized humans as "the primates who tell stories." Psychologist Robyn Dawes went much further, suggesting humans are "the primates whose cognitive capacity shuts down in the absence of a story."

To be sure, we love a good story. Research suggests that anecdotes can be as persuasive as hard data, and that jurors are influenced by the quality of the prosecution's and defense's " stories" when deciding whether to find a defendant guilty. Even in science, we seek explanations, not mere descriptions; in history, we want a good narrative, not a mere sequence of events.

But what's so great about stories? Are they mere entertainment? Or do they offer something more? In particular, could stories be a key to human intelligence?

Stories have been studied in various forms across a range of disciplines, from literary and media studies to psychology and linguistics. But to get a handle on their potential role in human intelligence, it's especially illuminating to consider how they've cropped up in artificial intelligence.

One reason AI systems might need to understand or produce stories is because they interact with humans. Indeed, there's evidence that people trust robots more, and can work with them more effectively, when the robots offer more human-like explanations. But even in the absence of interaction with humans, could stories contribute to machine intelligence?

Researchers in AI have explored a potential role for stories since at least the 1990s. In a book published in 1990, for example, computer and cognitive scientist Roger Schank argued for a crucial link between narrative and intelligence, with narratives guiding learning, structuring memory and supporting generalization. In 2011, AI researcher Patrick Winston advocated the Strong Story Hypothesis, according to which "story telling and understanding have a central role in human intelligence," going on to suggest an artificial system with some human-like capabilities.

These ideas have evolved into calls for computational "narrative intelligence," which computer scientist Mark Riedl defines as "the ability to craft, tell, understand, and respond affectively to stories." He suggests that narrative intelligence may be a crucial step in machine "enculturation," allowing artificial intelligence systems to acquire human social norms, customs, values and etiquette - aspects of commonsense understanding that are notoriously difficult for computers to learn.

Not all AI theorists agree with this emphasis on stories, but considering proposals for how computers could benefit from stories can help us appreciate the role they might play for humans. Just as computers might use stories or narratives as a way to structure memory and learning, humans may as well. And just as stories might provide a valuable way to "enculturate" machines, they surely provide a crucial mechanism for the social transmission of information in humans.

It doesn't follow that all forms of intelligence must involve stories - indeed, we should avoid the temptation to define intelligence in narrowly human terms. But as Riedl suggests, artificial systems that lack narrative intelligence seem to possess " an alien sort of intelligence." It may well be that some of our uniquely human intelligence is grounded in our capacity for understanding and constructing stories.
Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

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Are Stories A Key To Human Intelligence?

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In a talk in Pittsburgh in 1997, the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould allegedly characterized humans as "the primates who tell stories." Psychologist Robyn Dawes went much further, suggesting humans are "the primates whose cognitive capacity shuts down in the absence of a story." To be sure, we love a good story.

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New York Times--Learning Network

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What’s Going On in This Graph? | April 10, 2018 (Published 2018)

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Look closely at these graphs, and join the moderated conversation about what you and other students see.

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New York Times--Learning Network

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40 More Intriguing Photos to Make Students Think (Published 2020)

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A new slide show of some of our favorite “What’s Going On in This Picture?” posts, culled from the last four years of images.

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Using Quotations to Generate Questions and Stimulate Conversation

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Using Quotations to Generate Questions and Stimulate Conversation

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Lesson by Dan Fouts