Depth and Complexity: ❓Unanswered Questions

This is part of a larger series on introducing Depth and Complexity

By far, ❓Unanswered Questions was the prompt that I under-utilized with my own class. Now I see it in a whole new light, and boy is there immense power in prompting students to note and explore truly unanswered questions.

My goal with any of the prompts of depth and complexity is to change students’ thinking, not merely “use depth and complexity.” We should see a serious change in the way students think about and understand a topic. It’s not about dropping a picture onto a worksheet.

My Problem

In the past, I’d use Unanswered Questions like this: “What don’t you know about this topic?” It would come at the bottom of a worksheet. Totally tacked on. Not really thought out. And there’s no way that it met my goal of significantly changing the way students think about a topic.

Since then I’ve learned that we’ve got an epidemic in school: kids don’t ask curious questions. To me, it’s an education emergency that we are all complicit in. Unanswered Questions is a tool to help us fix this problem.

Unanswered Questions reminds us that learning begins when we wonder; when we realize that we’re missing something. As teachers, it reminds us to give students room to even realize they don’t know something before cramming them full of information.

Wondering

If we agree that students have not had instruction nor practice in asking curious questions, we need to start by warming them up. And my favorite word for that is “wondering.”

Hopefully, you subscribe to my free weekly mailer at Puzzlements.co. If not, sign up and you’ll get five links every Friday to curiosity-provoking images, videos, and articles.

All we do is practice wondering. We’re looking for things we don’t yet know. Things we simply wonder about. These are our Unanswered Questions.

I like to jot them down and display them. What I don’t do is answer them! Allow these questions to remain unanswered and I guarantee you that you’ll start having students show up with answers. Not everyone; but, eventually, someone will. And you can celebrate that their curiosity was so strong that they remembered their unanswered question, went home and found an answer. You can read more about how this got started here.

I love seeing classrooms that have a list of unanswered questions hanging there. My own students loved keeping track of the things we didn’t yet know.

Moving To Content

As students get better at “wondering” with sample videos and images, begin moving this practice to content. Give them space to explore before you teach. Let them wonder a bit. Learning is far more powerful when we are curious about the answer.

Consider, too, that there are things that we, as humans, do not know yet about content. This is a fantastic way to frame a lesson: focus them immediately on the truly ❓ Unanswered Questions. This works with any content, too:

• With a story, do we truly know the author’s intent? Do we not know something about a character? Is there ambiguity in the ending?
• In math, I love looking at mathematical conjectures, in which real mathematicians aren’t yet sure of the truth.
• Science is packed with questions we don’t yet know the answers to.
• Social Studies is also filled with missing information. What really happened on Roanoke? What did Washington really feel when he agreed to become president? Was the Trojan Horse a real thing?

I also love exposing students to mind-bending paradoxes that confront them with ideas that aren’t just unknown, but actually unknowable.

So, if you’re using Unanswered Questions to just ask: “What don’t you know?” at the end of a worksheet, consider flipping that around and provoking curiosity right away in your lessons.

This is part of a larger series on introducing Depth and Complexity