This is a message to professors everywhere, and people who want to be professors.
I was one of a group of ten undergrads getting to audit a low-residency Masters of Fine Arts program at my college during the Winter Break. As part of this, we were serving as a test audience for some of the grad students who had to lead a discussion/lecture for their peers. I don't know if we were exactly what they expected. Discussion was rather superficial and sometimes we even met their questions with silence. I'm sure they left our class either concerned about the content of their presentation or with low opinions of what kind of discourse undergrads were capable of.
But the truth is we're extremely capable of complex readings of a text. I probably, thanks to my early attempt at being an English Major, know more critical theory than half the graduate students that came in front of us and can utilize to break down any text I'm presented with. But I wasn't asked that. Instead, I got stupid questions.
Here's what I mean by “stupid questions,” too. I don't mean that the questions were worded poorly, or that they were unimportant, but that they were the sorts of questions you'd ask stupid people. They were things like “What's happening in this story/poem?” Questions with obvious answers. Questions asked as diagnostic tools, to confirm that the class is thinking the same way as the teacher.
The idea is that this is in some way a better teaching method than just coming out and saying what it is the professor wants their students to know. It forces the students being posed the question to come up with the answer, rather than absorbing knowledge. Some people call this the Socratic method: the process by which asking questions over and over leads to an answer. However, this isn't the method Socrates himself utilized. Socrates didn't ask questions about subjects with definite answers. Socrates asked questions that were open-ended, questions meant to stimulate spirited debate and critical thinking to arrive at answers previously unheard. One of the graduate students even mentioned this common misconception of the Socratic method, but the truth was she herself was one of the worst offenders.
I don't want to hammer the grad students alone, they're not the only offenders. I've seen this in professors with PhDs as well. They use it to ask small things about assigned reading as sort of a reading test without paper.
The trouble is that this approach does not open up conversation, especially not in the modern college classroom. Quite the opposite: it shuts down conversation. Asking a question like “What's the name of Hamlet's girlfriend and how does she die?” is not a question that provokes a lot of thought (*spoiler alert* Ophelia; she drowns). In a modern college class, most students will not answer that question. It's not a real question, they're not really being asked to participate in the conversation about a text. Only a brown-noser will field a question of that poor caliber.
So how do you ask questions that motivate people to respond? Well, the first is to get rid of basic knowledge questions. If you, as a teacher, assign a reading, expect your students to have read it. If you really absolutely need to confirm everyone's on the same page, ask if there is a student who will give a quick summary of what they read. If no one will, do it yourself. Then ask open ended questions meant to provoke a response. Here's one “Do you agree with what the writer has written?” This is a really basic question, and if you're getting silence it, it's because students are surprised to be asked to challenge the written word. When you ask an open-ended question, you can also feel free to force students to respond, as long as you preface it with the explanation that there really aren't any wrong answers.
The best example I can give you is my English 220 Critical Theory professor at Dickinson College: Prof. David Ball. Ball assigned my class some really heavy reading, as you might expect Critical Theory to be. But he didn't really ask a question along the lines of “tell me what happened here.” He demanded that we contribute every class and demonstrate that we had come to class prepared based on the quality of our contribution. I've rarely felt honestly ashamed at not having done the reading in a class, but if I didn't read a night's assignment for ENG220, Ball really made me feel like I'd let him down. I wanted to contribute in that class, I wanted to say something intelligent or insightful. And, honestly, I tried to do that just to keep up with my peers in that class, who were capable (as sophomore undergrads) of spouting some pretty terrific textual analysis.
The thing is, it's extremely patronizing to ask diagnostic questions in a college classroom. Imagine walking into an Advanced Calculus class on the first day and the teacher, just to confirm everyone was able to do basic arithmetic, asked the class to write out the answer to the equation “2+2=” on a paper and hand it in. That class would be dead on its very first day. I expect the entire class would drop out of the insult alone. When you're assigning a text to read, you're not assigning the content of the text or the meaning of that content, either. What you're assigning is the understanding and application of that meaning in the students. They need to be able to challenge or support the text. They need to go outside it and deep down inside it. They need to be able to break it apart and rebuild it from the ground up, making it theirs in the process. And they won't do that if you challenge them with stupid questions.
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