Creativity Step 9

Outcomes

To achieve Step 9, individuals will demonstrate that they can develop ideas by asking themselves questions. 

In Step 8, the focus was on developing ideas through mind mapping. This step continues to think about how to develop ideas, this time through the use of effective questioning.

Learners need to be able to:

• The role of questioning in developing ideas 

• What sort of questions to ask

Introduction

• One of the best ways of helping ourselves to go through the process of improving our ideas is through asking good questions. These questions help us to pre-empt the response that others will have to our ideas and will help us to consider whether there are other ways of reaching our goals too.

• There are two broad types of questions, as you might be familiar with from Listening (See Listening Step 7): 

  • Closed questions are those which can be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. For example, ‘Is that…’ or ‘Did…’ They are useful for confirming or denying facts. ‍

  • Open questions are those that cannot be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. For example, they tend to start with words like ‘who’, what’, ‘why’, ‘when’ and ‘how’. Sometimes these questions can still be answered with short factual answers, but they have the potential to be much broader.

Teach & Apply

• There is a place for closed questions when questioning your ideas, but mostly around whether you have achieved particular success criteria. If your ideas don’t achieve the success criteria, then these sorts of questions will help you to identify that. 

• However, open questions are much more useful – for example, if you haven’t hit one of the success criteria, the obvious question is ‘how could this be adapted to meet the success criteria?’ 

• Other open questions that you might find useful include are: 

  • How does this idea fit in with the brief? 

  • What would make this shorter / easier to use / more engaging / simpler to understand / more enjoyable? 

  • How will I know if this is an idea that will work in practice? 

  • How will other people react to this idea? 

Reflection & Assessment

Embed these strategies across your teaching and coaching to help learners apply what they’ve learnt.

• Build a positive attitude amongst learners to redrafting and reworking their ideas, whether this is in a written format or when they are being active.

Use these ideas for ways of assessing this skill step to help you check learners’ understanding and confidence.

• When students ask a question, for example in a match or learning a new skill, encourage them to tell you if it is a 'closed' or 'open' question. 

• Ask learners these key reflection questions:

  • Why is questioning a vital part of developing ideas? 

  • Why do we need to redraft and revise our ideas? 

  • What sort of questions are likely to help to improve your ideas?