Asking Questions and Listening to Answers

I'm still thinking about Reggio Emilia, and using a Reggio-Inspired approach when teaching children. This isn't an approach that I have ever heard Speech & Language Pathologists (SLPs) discussing, but Reggio Emilia is an educational approach that values learning through thoughtful contemplation, conversation, and translation of ideas. Children learning from a Reggio-inspired teacher might translate their ideas from conversation, to drawing, to sculpting, to dancing, to writing. Translating ideas like this make the ideas come alive in many different ways. So, even though SLPs aren't currently using Reggio Emilia, it feels appropriate to attempt to translate its ideas into my own SLP language.

Today I have been thinking about the questions I can ask the kids I work with, in order to inspire them to reach their speech or language goals using thoughtful contemplation, conversation and translation of their ideas. Of course, the act of asking kids questions is a commonly used method of teaching. For example, I hear adults ask kids:

- "What color is this?"
- "Is whispering loud or quiet?"
- "What should you do when you have a problem? Should you give up or ask someone for help?"
- "Can anyone think of what you should say when you meet someone for the first time?"

But with this type of question, in the adult's mind and in the child's mind, there is going to be a right answer and a wrong answer. The adult knows what the right answer is, and the child hopes to get it right. I wouldn't call this thoughtful contemplation, an invitation for conversation, or a chance to translate ideas. I think a more apt term for this type of question is a test, or a chance to practice recalling previously learned information.

So I am trying to come up with some examples of question-types that might serve a more thoughtful purpose:

- "Can we find things that are as green as this bug?"
- "Is anything quieter than a whisper?"
- "What kinds of things might help you get that to open?
- "What will happen if you go up to her and say, 'honk honk honk?'"

Of course, if you ask this set of questions with a "right answer" in mind, they could end up being just like the "test" questions in the first section above. So if the goal is a Reggio-Inspired approach, there is much more to do than just changing what you are asking. But it's an interesting place to start wondering about what type of conversational interactions serve the purposes you want them to serve.

A second step that is coming to mind is to accept the child's answer to a question like this as a hypothesis, and then invite the child to test their hypothesis. So perhaps the adult's response to a child's answer to a question is just as key: Instead of a "yes," or a "no," or an "actually," how about a response like, "Let's try it out," or, "Which idea do you want to try first?" or "Would you like to use these markers to draw a picture of that idea?"

So do these question-types serve a more thoughtful purpose? It's a hypothesis that I'm enjoying testing.