Yesterday I heard Warren Woytuck from The Critical Thinking Consortium present at the ACE Conference. Here is one of his slides about problematizing a question:
Note how by adding value descriptors, by specifying the intention of the question, the question changes to one where students need to compare and contrast, to qualify, make judgements, and/or explain their answers. And more than that, students need to ask more questions to come to an answer.
To me, that’s the key to a problemizing a question… How can you change a question so that it provokes more questions? If you ask a question and either:
A) Google can answer it; or
B) You already know the answer students will come up with; or
C) All students come to the same conclusion…
Then you didn’t really pose a good problem. You didn’t promote critical thinking.
When your questions are problematized, students need to interact with the question in a more meaningful and engaged way.
