In the final publication of the October throughline we explore how to build a culture of innovation one question at a time.
Tag: questioning
Use This Question At The Start Of Your Next Meeting To Increase Empathy And Connection
Everyone is here, right? Let’s get started; the first thing today is…
STOP ✋
Instead of launching into the first item on the agenda, ask your team, “What’s on your mind?”
The Curse of Knowledge
The problem is we assume everyone is ready to start and focus. Our preparation for the session means we have a high familiarity when others might not. This cognitive bias is the curse of knowledge.
Design The Transition
The reality is we are bouncing from one meeting or workshop to another, with little processing time in between.
Create a short period of transition at the start of your meeting to pause and process. Ask, “What’s on your mind?” and talk about the issues raised.
Talk About The Talking
In this deliberate transition, you can frame the session and what to expect. I often say we can talk about the talking — meta-talking.
Refer to the type of thinking, dialogue and work that will be needed. I prefer to use this transition time to highlight the disposition or mindset that the meeting requires. Not just list agenda content.
Build Understanding
A key benefit I witness from hundreds of meetings and workshops I have designed is increased empathy.
When we share answers to “What’s on your mind?” we create a better understanding of our disposition. As the meeting or workshop continues, we are more likely to be empathetic to a colleague.
“What’s on your mind?” increases empathy, which is an excellent place for any meeting to start.
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
A mental model that I frequently use is the Ladder of Abstraction. It was developed by the American linguist S. I. Hayakawa in his 1939 book Language in Action.
The model describes varying levels of abstraction (up) and concreteness (down) and helps describe our language and thoughts.
The higher up the ladder you are the more abstract the idea, language or thought is. The lower you are on the ladder the more concrete the idea, language or thought is.
You can also think about the ladder as scaling out (abstracting) and scaling back in (concrete). I often use the language:
Let’s zoom out for second. Why is this connected to other projects?
OR
What does this look like in the classroom? Zoom back into the day to day experience for me.
And of course there is a parallel to the ideas of theory Vs experience.
It is helpful to note that different types of questions or interactions move dialogue up or down the ladder.
Let’s look at some simple examples based on developmental work in schools. The first few illustrate how you can use the ladder as a way to think about problem solving. You can also use the 5 Whys mental model here.
*Remember that the ideas illustrated on the ladders below would each emerge during discussion and dialogue. Each idea might unfold as different questions are posed and pondered on.
The blue example below is simple enough to see it is a not a behaviour issue but a communication issue perhaps.
The green example suggests the link between report writing and staff wellbeing. It not just an assessment issue but something that might have a negative impact on health.
Yellow and purple below are slightly different as they might illustrate a more general use of the ladder. Not necessarily to understand the problem, as above, but to broaden our understanding of an idea.
When we ladder down into the concrete and back up into the abstract concept we have a much more rounded sense of the idea. This makes communication much more successful as you work both ends of the ladder.
Be mindful of which end you spend time in the most when working with your ideas or with your teams. Try and strike a balance.
The Ladder of Abstraction is commonly used as a model for interviewing and I have used this many times during the design thinking process. As this piece from the dschool illustrates.
Often times abstract statements are more meaningful but not as directly actionable, and the opposite is true of more specific statements. That is why you ask ‘why?’ often during interviews – in order to get toward more meaningful feelings from users rather than specific likes and dislikes, and surface layer answers.
So it is great model for your design toolkit.
Take a look at these further thinking prompts to help you move in an agile way on the ladder, by Andrew Dlugan on the Six Minutes site. A great post that is well worth a read.
Moving Down the Ladder
- Embrace the phrase “For example…” .
Provide real-world tangible examples for your theories and ideas. - Use sensory language.
Help your audience see, touch, hear, taste, and smell. - Be specific.
Provide ample details. - Tell stories and anecdotes.
Stories add emotion and realism to any theory. - Cite data, statistics, and case studies.
They offer support for your theories. - Feature photographs and props.
Remember that all words are a higher level of abstraction compared to the real thing. Use the real thing. - Have a strong call-to-action.
Show your audience how to put your message into practice. - Answer “How?” questions.
Questions like “How does this work?” force you to more concrete explanations.
Moving Up the Ladder
- Answer “Why is this important?”
Give the deeper meaning behind the concrete facts and data. - Provide the big picture.
Explain the context and orient your audience. - Reveal patterns and relationships.
Help your audience see how the ideas connect — both to other ideas and their lives. - Draw diagrams.
Help your audience form mental models of processes, objects, etc. - Use appropriate charts.
Go beyond pure data to show trends. - Reveal the lesson.
Follow every story or case study with the key insights. - Draw inferences.
Apply sound logic to generalize from particular cases. - Summarize into principles and guidelines.
Help the audience learn from your experience by providing principles they can use. - Appeal to shared ideals.
Draw connections between your message and the ideals held by your audience, such as justice, truth, liberty, or freedom.
–
Let me know how you get on with this little model, a worthy addition to your toolkit. This is a core activity for me, something I keep coming back to again and again.
Emerging leaders often find this difficult as they have to step out of just thinking about their own classroom.
I firmly believe that the capacity to move up and down the Ladder of Abstraction is a key skill for any leader.
Some further reading:
Method 19 of 100: Laddering Questions | Designing the User Experience as Autodesk
How/Why Laddering | The K12 Lab Wiki | dschool
Abstraction Laddering: Clearly Define the Problem | Autodesk
The Ladder of Abstraction and the Public Speaker | Six Minutes
5 Simple Questions To Encourage Student Voice
This is a recent resource I have shared on Twitter that has proven really useful and very popular with educators. Thanks to Rebecca Alber and Edutopia for sharing/creating the original.
You should complement this with some of the following great resources on questioning in the classroom.
- 26 Questions You Could Use Instead from Max Ray that focuses on the types of questions you could use in the Maths classroom.
- Top Ten Questioning Strategies from Alex Quigley is a great read and has some lovely ideas for immediate use in the classroom.
- Encourage students’ higher order questioning from our very own NoTosh Lab, which provides a simple download for a higher order questioning cube.
Practical Steps to Get Out of the Way of Children’s Thinking
Eleanor Duckworth’s work on Critical Explorers asserts that the combination of: teachers as curriculum designers and the focus on children’s thinking and not simply our own, is a powerful learning duo.
Today we take a further look at some practical questioning strategies she has outlined in her work and a hexagonal thinking strategy you can use. The following is from the Critical Explorers site where you can delve more deeply into the ideas she offers.
Catch students’ interest
- Try to convey that you think they’ll enjoy exploring this image (or text, or map, etc.), and that what they are doing and saying sheds new light for you on the object. It always does.
- Try to keep them thinking about it, even when they may think they have done all they can.
- Try to find out what they are thinking about the image, and to follow their thinking as it changes.
For example:
Ask for observations:
- Start with a question that allows for a very small answer, where everyone has something to say — for example, “What do you notice?”
- Ask them to point to the image and show everyone what they are talking about.
- Ask what else they notice.
- Ask them to say more about an observation they’ve made.
Ask for clarification:
- Ask them to refer back to the image itself to back up whatever they have to say about it.
- Ask them to clarify something, or to explain what makes them say what they do.
- Make a hunch about what is behind what they say, and check the hunch with them.
Ask about conflicting or contrasting ideas:
- Draw attention to some seeming inconsistency in what they have said.
- Ask what about the image puzzles them.
- Ask how what they have said fits with another part of the image, or with something they said earlier, or with something someone else has said.
- Ask them to think about other students’ ideas, and to refer to the image to explain why they agree or disagree.
To provide further support for children we have found that a hexagonal thinking activity gives them a clear way to structure their thinking, seeing the combinations of ideas they have and manipulating their thinking in a tangible way.
You can explore a range of resources and further reading about hexagonal thinking/learning such as one of David Didau’s original posts. This post is useful from Frances Brown that extends some of the ideas and of course HOOKed on Learning’s resource page which offers many a link journey to explore.
This summary presentation from my good friend Chris Harte, a Leading Teacher at the John Monash Science School, is a great place to start.