A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

by Warren Berger

“Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.”)

To encourage or even allow questioning is to cede power—not

“Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. By middle school, they’ve pretty much stopped asking.”

Tony Wagner says, “Somehow, we’ve defined the goal of schooling as enabling you to have more ‘right answers’ than the person next to you.

Five learning skills, or “habits of mind,” were at the core of her school, and each was matched up with a corresponding question: Evidence: How do we know what’s true or false? What evidence counts? Viewpoint: How might this look if we stepped into other shoes, or looked at it from a different direction? Connection: Is there a pattern? Have we seen something like this before? Conjecture: What if it were different? Relevance: Why does this matter? Meier’s core questions came out of her own connective inquiry;