Wonder-Based Questioning - Part 3

Our articles often contain unconventional ideas inspired by the young people and amazing educators we have met. These are not intended to offend, but rather to spark curiosity and inspire contemplation. We do not claim these views as truths, merely one point of view. If these ideas challenge or offend you, we invite you to engage with them critically and share your thoughts with us.

Welcome back to our Wonder-Based Questioning Series, where we explore inquiry-driven education by empowering students with our Wonder Question Technique (WQT).

If you missed it, read Part 1 here! Read Part 2 here!

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” - Albert Einstein… (well, maybe)…

Let’s Light This Candlestick

The world of education needs to change. We know this.

Information and knowledge are not what make a successful human. It’s the ability to think critically, ask questions, and build successful relationships. In a world where you can learn ANYTHING, it’s truly about learning to be self-aware and ask “why?”

And we old people are finally starting to catch up.

Take NY State’s new Graduation Measures Initiative: A Transformational Vision. The Portrait of a Graduate (a new conception upon which students would receive a diploma) is based on “the essential skills, knowledge, mindsets, and attributes needed for success in 21st-century life, college, careers, service, and citizenry.”

Students would demonstrate their proficiency through evidence in multiple ways.

Educators no longer need to teach or even know information.

Instead, it is about having the learner (student and teacher) guide a conversation by asking questions that the class engages with and discovering the answers. It’s about helping them become effective communicators, critical thinkers, innovative problem solvers, and culturally, emotionally, and socially competent.

That’s the world we live in.

Today, educators just need to be willing to have the discussion.

And the Wonder Question Technique is a great place to start.

It Begins with a Strength-Based Model

At Sweethearts & Heroes, we believe in a strength-based approach to education. Unlike a deficit-based approach that emphasizes students’ weaknesses or gaps in knowledge (focusing on the challenges), we want to identify and nurture each student’s unique talents, interests, and abilities.

We want to integrate the strengths of every individual into the community.

To do this, we’ve teamed up with Thrively, a strength-based online platform and learner-centered ecosystem founded on the core philosophy that every child deserves to thrive.

Technology can feel overwhelming, but it’s here to stay.

Educators need tools that truly support their students in a constantly changing world.

Thrively is a platform focused on understanding students as individuals.

It uses tools like the Well-Being, Hope, and Connections Index to gauge where each child is emotionally, personally, and socially while helping teachers tailor their approach. Rather than adding another layer of complexity, it works with existing programs to make them more effective.

It captures and builds that “portrait” of your students.

The platform creates personalized learning paths that connect students’ strengths to real-world opportunities, encouraging curiosity and adaptability through wonder-based learning. It’s about fostering education that’s as unique as a fingerprint.

The Sweethearts & Heroes courses on Thrively emphasize inquiry-based learning. They’re not about memorizing facts but sparking self-reflection and meaningful conversations centered around humanity. These lessons encourage students to build on their community’s strengths, empowering them to drive change in their schools.

Above all, we want to shepherd students to think critically and ask better questions.

Do You Need Thrively?

Of course not.

The Wonder Question Technique is designed for simplicity. As long as you have a central focus or prompt (which we’ll get into shortly), students can complete this process with a simple pencil and paper anywhere.

Thrively’s platform will elevate the experience by providing students with the right environment and seamlessly capturing all the data. We’re tapping into their world and allowing anonymity. As you’ll see, allowing students to ask these questions anonymously is a good place to start as you delve into these topics.

Types of Thinking

In shaping our approach to questioning and thinking, we have drawn much inspiration from the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) developed by the Right Question Institute (RQI). We give full credit to the RQI for their groundbreaking work in empowering learners to generate and refine their questions, a method that resonates deeply with our mission at Sweethearts & Heroes.

We’ve adapted their question-focused philosophy to spark curiosity, critical thinking, and build human skills like self-awareness and empathy.

Questioning and thinking, while natural, are also skills that we rarely, if ever, teach.

Asking good questions is a superpower everyone is born with and can access again; it just takes practice. Like the inherent muscles of empathy, these skills can be learned and strengthened.

Asking good questions helps you figure stuff out (gain autonomy), feel more in control (gain competency), and prepare yourself to join in on big conversations with others (gain relatedness).

To improve our ability to ask questions, we must first understand a few different types of thinking that will help us achieve this goal.

Divergent Questioning (QFT Step 1)

The first is divergent questioning or thinking.

Divergent questioning encourages exploring a broad range of inquiries. It emphasizes flexibility, creativity, and generating multiple, often unconventional questions to spark novel perspectives.

Like brainstorming, this process prioritizes expanding the scope of inquiry by asking “What if?” or “I wonder if?” to uncover a wide range of potential directions.

Divergent thinking is not about reflecting on the best way to ask a question or to sit and think of different ways to ask something. Instead, it’s about generating many questions to lay the foundation for refined thinking.

You can’t get quality without quantity.

Much like a writer overcoming writer’s block by putting words on paper (even if they aren’t good), you must throw out as many questions as possible to work through the junk and uncover the needles in the haystack.

Convergent Questioning (QFT Step 2)

Ideally, we start with divergent questioning (coming up with as many questions as possible) and funnel down to convergent questioning or thinking.

Convergent questioning focuses on refining, narrowing down your questions, and crafting precise, targeted inquiries that drive you toward the most effective discussion. It relies on logical reasoning, analysis, and critical thinking to determine the best way or how we need to ask a question based on what we want to know.

This approach seeks to hone in on the most efficient and impactful questions to help us gain our desired answers. These are the needles in the haystack questions.

However, to bridge the gap between the random flurry of questions that come to mind and narrowing them down to what you really want to know, we must reflect and ask ourselves why we are asking these questions in the first place.

This is called metacognitive thinking.

Metacognitive Questioning (QFT Step 3)

Metacognitive questioning or thinking is the awareness and understanding of one’s own thinking processes. It is thinking about thinking.

Before we move from divergent to convergent thinking, we need to ask ourselves why we want to know certain things to guide us toward asking the most relevant questions.

The foundation of all human skills is self-awareness.

This is the filter that takes us from divergent to convergent questions.

Here, we must pause and ask ourselves why we want certain answers or ask specific questions. It is about challenging or catching yourself within your own assumptions to figure out what you are really seeking.

What do I want to know?

How do I want an answer?

Are there questions that will help me get to my answer quicker, better, or more succinctly?

How can I ask a better question?

Asking yourself why isn’t easy, but it's important to look yourself in the mirror and understand your reasons or motivations behind the questions.

It takes courage to reflect on why you ask questions, especially difficult ones. The process isn’t easy, especially at first.

How often do we ask ourselves why we want to know something? It takes practice to follow those neural connections and pave those thinking pathways.

The process, however, is simple, repeatable, and can be completed by anyone, anywhere.

1. Divergent Questioning (DQ) generates ideas;

2. Metacognitive Questioning (MQ) helps us reflect by asking ourselves why we want to ask specific questions;

3. Convergent Questioning (CQ) refines and narrows down our best questions and how we want to ask them.

The Wonder Question Technique is often best completed in smaller groups of 3-4 people. It can be done in larger groups, but you may find that if you have too many people, the process might become too divergent.

We recommend that if you have a bigger group, you separate into small groupings. At the end of the Wonder Question Technique, you can come back together for the next step, Socratic Dialogue, which we’ll get to later.

Sweethearts & Heroes Wonder Question Technique

To begin our Wonder Question Technique (WQT), we start with “What if?”

Step 1 — “What If?” Stage — Wonder Storming

Aligned with the QFT process, we begin with divergent thinking.

This is the “I wonder if?” or “I wonder about?” or “What if?” question stage.

This stage is all about brainstorming — or Wonder Storming, if you will.

The Prompt

Our Wonder Beams blast out in many directions and stretch on forever. We can wonder about anything and everything, so we need a focal point to come together as a collective to share in our wonder.

To begin, have a focus that your group can generate questions about based on what they want to learn further or understand better. This requires a central prompt or Concept Focus to set the stage.

Imagine a tornado as this Concept Focus.

The tornado acts as our frame and provides structure for the questions.

At the top, where the tornado is at its widest, it emerges out of a variety of clouds, or what we’ll call “thought bubbles.” These clouds are your unchanneled thoughts or questions, all this infinite potential of our Wonder Beams, focused into the tornado.

Prompts can come in many ways, from a simple statement, phrase, or math problem, to presenting students with an image, video, or audio file.

In Thrively, our central theme or topic is delivered through video lessons, perspective-based questions, and fun exercises that apply the key concepts.

WQT can be done with any subject, but our courses and programs are built around the human condition and human skills. We’re interested in the science of human relationships and human capacity. We’re trying to discover what it means to be human and to build relationships and consciousness between individuals.

Let’s take Luke, Tessa, Eleanor, and Brady for example.

The prompt they’re working on today is: “What do you wonder about Mahatma Gandhi’s travels across India and the world?”

You don’t need to phrase the prompts this way, but “What do you wonder about…” is designed to evoke that state of fantastical curiosity. We also like to encourage students to phrase the question in the “I wonder” context, when possible.

This is not required at all, but again, it taps into that vein of imagination.

At this stage, we want the students to generate as many questions as possible, which they might want to discuss later in the process.

Again, it’s all about quantity over quality here. Students should not stop to think about, discuss, analyze, reflect, or answer their questions. Generate a wide range of questions to explore as many angles as possible and spark curiosity.

Capture these questions exactly as they come to you (don’t edit them). The only requirement is to be listed as questions rather than statements.

Take Luke’s question about Gandhi’s travels, for example: “I wonder if he was a minimalist?”

Or Tessa’s: “I wonder how many families he stayed with?”

Eleanor’s: “I wonder how long he traveled for?”

Brady’s: “I wonder if he rode a camel?”

Since there is a never-ending list of questions one could pose to anything, it is helpful to form a bit of a time constraint around this stage.

Wonder Storming Individually

Most people may be uncomfortable discussing these topics at first, especially when it’s not the norm. These conversations and questions often require a lot of vulnerability.

Instead of jumping right away into a discussion or dialogue with others (which requires social awareness and relationship skills), framing our perspective or thoughts around these concepts can help us discuss these issues beyond the surface level.

In social settings, especially if we come in unprepared for a discussion, we often feel self-conscious or judged by asking questions we may perceive as naive or even stupid. Our predominant motivation, especially as young people, is to find human acceptance. Thus, in these settings, we frequently hide our honesty and vulnerability to cater to the social pressures of appearing competent in order to be accepted.

This is another reason Thrively is optimal for this process. It allows for anonymity as students enter their questions into the reflection box without feeling self-conscious. The courses facilitate each step of the Wonder Question process and capture all the data on a progress report.

The educator can utilize the responses as needed throughout the rest of this process.

We recommend that you start your students with the Wonder Questioning Technique in this way. Working through it first individually will allow us to be more honest with ourselves without the social pressure to appear competent.

This builds self-awareness (the foundation of all other human skills) and mitigates much of the armor we would wear if we started with a group conversation.

If you don’t use Thrively, simply ask your students to write down their Wonder Storm questions without discussing them out loud.

Wonder Storming Together and Building Emotional Intelligence

Wonder Storming also thrives in a group setting.

As your students become familiar with the WQT process and think and talk about these questions, building relationships with each other, you’ll begin to form a secure environment of trust where people won’t feel judged.

We highly encourage you to go through the WQT process in your small groups when you get here. This is paramount to building and developing the group’s collective emotional intelligence. When individuals play with ideas together, it elevates everyone’s thinking ability.

Getting students into small groups to work on generating questions together is powerful, especially with a pre-established security within the group dynamic.

Collaboration sparks a unique exchange of ideas, encouraging students to build on each other’s curiosity and uncover perspectives they might not have considered alone. This shared exploration amplifies creativity and strengthens interpersonal connections, laying the groundwork for deeper self-awareness and relational skills.

Summary of Step 1

Provide a central focus or prompt, and have individuals (or small groups) Wonder Storm and capture answers in Thrively or on good old paper.

One can ask an infinite number of questions about anything.

However, specific questions will get us closer to the answers we are seeking.

Thus, the real question is, how do we transition from divergent to convergent thinking?

We need a self-reflective piece or filter to sort through and narrow down our best questions, and that filter is the metacognitive.