Towards the end of the 1960s there came out of New York University a publication entitled Teaching as a Subversive Activity, which was to have quite a profound effect on the styles of a number of classroom teachers. Its authors, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, held that teachers can never hope to successfully define what will be important to our pupils during their lives – so we should not even try. For example, how will computers have developed by the year 2020? Impossible even to make an educated worthwhile guess. It is more worthwhile, argued Postman and Weingartner, to develop a questions based curriculum, giving students the intellectual pragmatism to address any future situation by framing quality questions.
To support this stance, their book advocated a number of classroom strategies to produce questioning students – rather than people who could simply recite the names of capital cities, foreign words and climatic conditions. One was that teachers should set aside one day each term in which they give no answers, value judgements or conclusive statements, but confine themselves to questioning and encouraging pupils. Postman and Weingartner also attempted to define the most important issues of the day in the form of 100 questions around which a modern school’s curriculum could be shaped. These questions, they intimated, should not be employed as a means of searching for answers, but rather as a basis for asking further questions.
How often, in marking examination papers, are pupils criticised for not answering the question asked? Certain terms within a question can set up a buzz and stimulate the outpouring of familiar material that may not actually address the requirements of a question. This is why it is so important to spend time studying the very nature of questions and getting our pupils to generate their own carefully constructed queries. We accept that teaching and learning in the schools of 2000 focus on a complex web of questioning and answering skills, but do we really do all we could to develop questioning processes and skills? The most intellectually able children can usually harness their curiosity to frame searching questions that will produce the answers they require – but just as we accept that thinking skills need to be taught, why should the same not be true of questioning skills?
Postman and Weingartner produced in Teaching as a Subversive Activity a questions framework aimed at encouraging students to focus on questions rather than answers. Figure 1 (overleaf ) gives an adaptation of that original that has been used with considerable success in secondary schools for a number of years. The
recommended method of working is in small groups; and if the class is of mixed ability, the teacher should take care to ensure that each group has at least one established able thinker. The great thing about this exercise is that not only will pupils learn from one another, but the very process of study has its own osmotic effect.
I have always introduced the framework (which has been a basis of learning in both English and personal/
social education lessons), by informing pupils that this unit of work will take a number of lessons to complete. Regardless of this information, most groups report the task complete before the end of the first lesson. Unfortunately, this serves merely as an indictment of the ‘quick-fix’ answer culture which permeates so much classroom work. What has usually happened is that the framework’s key words ‘Study’ and ‘Answer’ have been ignored as pupils chase the question marks in the top set of questions, assuming them to be the main point of the exercise.