Divergent thinking is a practice of mine. In my second year in university, a professor requested 2000 uses for a K-cup as one of our primary deliverables for the semester, Ever since being introduced to the idea as a university student, it is something I have held onto for personal practice, have taught in workshops, and have leveraged as a life coach.
For this blog, I spent 5 minutes in a divergent thinking exercise where I exclusively generated questions, called a Question Quickfire. It was 5 minutes of unadulterated, stream-of-consciousness question generation. You can watch how that went for me in this video:
Before this, I had never used this practice to exclusively generate questions; I am falling in love with divergent thinking all over again.
Turning off judgment, and allowing the mind to take you on a journey through inquiry is a meditative and powerful experience. In fact, research indicates that based on the neurology of divergent thinking, it can often be “intellectually rewarding and satisfying.” (Berger, 2014, p. 22). I would venture to guess, that in those 5 minutes, I asked at least 3 questions that could lead to interesting business opportunities or projects worth pursuing. These ideas came purely from the inspiration of the Question Quickfire itself. If I had external inspiration or considerations in my head, I can only imagine what questions I could generate that could make way for paths worth exploring.
One of the big takeaways from reading A More Beautiful Question (Berger, 2014) in anticipation of this exercise is that the greatest questioners are between the ages of 2 and 4. Great minds who are thinking about questions are wondering how to keep that keen sense of curiosity alive for longer. In the example of Deborah Meier, insight into building a school around questioning resonated with my experience in asking questions for 5 minutes. In Meier’s school “a third-grade class studying medieval society ‘not only read books but built castles and made armor,’” (Berger, 2014, p. 62). As I completed my questions, I felt an urge to tinker and do research. As I found myself asking questions about pens and compatibility, I wanted to try a bunch of pens, and take them apart, and find people who make pens, and learn about hands and how humans hold pens, and the cycle of curiosity and divergent thinking continues.
Another element, that cannot be understated, is that it was fun. Kids are exploring the world around them. Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks often about the experimental nature of children (find an example of this at the end of this blog). They constantly ask questions and run experiments as they figure out what the world is and who they are. That is a fun process that he encourages adults to do a better job of ruining. Kindergarten, the grade that Meier wanted to emulate in her school (Berger, 2014, p. 62), is the most fun grade. Students are engaged, excited, having fun, and learning so much about This Question Quickfire experiment was fun! I felt childlike and playful.
The final takeaway I had from this activity, and reading about the Right Question Institute technique (Berger, 2014, p. 76), I was imagining the school I hope to start one day. What if we started every day with a Question Quickfire? What if every lesson ended with a Question Quickfire? How else could I solidify a culture of question-asking in a school? How can I inspire an entire community to ask more questions? With these additional questions came excitement at the limitless possibility. Asking questions is about being optimistic about all that could be true. In the spirit of Berger, Meier, Tyson, and so many other thinkers and educators I admire, I can use the power of questions to create the school of my dreams.
References:
Berger, W. (2014). A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas Book. Bloomsbury USA.
Goalcast. (2018, March 12). How to Raise Smarter Children. [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbX6aMfPtEw