Cr, mas 32% INNOVATION ABSTRACTS *33" t ] 2G we Published by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development “nu With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Sid W. Richardson Foundation WHO HAS THE QUESTIONS? Recently, the president of a community college queried faculty about a committee's draft of promotion and tenure guidelines. The responses were varied. One teacher's suggestion was to initiate competency testing dur- ing the probationary period of employment. He admitted it was an unpopular concept and further stated that if word ever got to his colleagues that he had even thought such nonsense, the president was to look in the department's storage room where he was surely to be found bound and gagged. The suggestion emanated from aconcern the teacher had about the number of tenured faculty he had observed who had an inadequate com- mand of teaching and/or the teaching of their specialization. Several important thoughts are embedded in the preceding episode. One is the notion of competency~ integral to a discussion of excellence, quality behavior, and productivity in teaching. Another is that of com- munication as a competency for teaching. And yet another, that of questioning and inquiry as a communication competency, is more subtle but represents a critical issue for both teaching and its administration. As a teaching competency, questioning and inquiry provides the teacher with a powerful tool for stimulat- ing, students toward the higher levels of thinking frequently ignored in education. As a student competency, inquiry skills instill responsibility as only the student can. As an administrator competency, asking the right questions at the right time enhances the decision-making process and fosters consensual management. In all cases, questioning and inquiry is particularly relevant to the information-seeking, information- disseminating crest that society is riding into the twenty-first century. In the future, the person equipped with questioning skills will be able to scan and search for answers in much the same way a fine computer does. Questioning and inquiry, while similar, bear unique distinctions. Both are precipitated by a state of uncer- tainty and a need-to-know. Both also suggest some form of interaction between two persons or a person and some area of knowledge. Questioning, however, suggests the Socratic method of teaching--interrogatives which generally presume a spoken or written response for satisfying the questions. Inquiry, on the other hand, sug- gests a more systematic form of questioning as is used in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Many teachers--whether they stumbled upon a career in teaching or prepared for it--acknowledge the incongruity between the demands of a first teaching assignment and their somewhat naive perceptions about how students learn. The interactive nature of questioning leaps both teacher and student toward mutual discovery, making learning organic and providing both with feedback in the teaching-learning partnership. It is from these concepts of questioning and feedback that the new instructional technologies such as interactive video are built. Hence, if there are financial constraints to prohibit sophisticated equipment, excellent teachers may take solace in knowing that they can produce the same or better results through “homespun” questioning strategies. Questioning, and inquiry can serve generic and content-specific functions. Some questions, for example, have managerial functions in the classroom; that is, they facilitate group behavior (examples: Is everyone ready to begin? OR May | have your attention, please?). Other general types of questions include: |. rhetorical questions: broad inquiries intended to stir curiosity but not necessarily a response — 2. recall questions: the lowest level of inquiry in which the respondent delves into acquired knowledge or experience 3. data collecting questions: a slightly higher mode of inquiry in which the student responds to observation or stimuli 4. dita processing questions: inquiries resulting in responses which are in the form of opinions, hypotheses, comparisons, or possible solutions certfication questions: the highest level of inquiry requiring evaluative or judgmental responses bh. convergent question. inquiries requiring that students explain, state relationships, or compare and contrast divergent questions: inquiries requiring students to reconstruct, predict, invent, design, or hypothesize 8. couluative questions. inquiries requiring students to judge, value, defend, or justify a choice or solution wt ~ pee Awd Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712