4.15: The Power of Listening: Questions – The Gateway to Knowledge

A toddler playing with blocks as she asks, "Did I hear you correctly?"

Questions: The Gateway to Knowledge

The key to asking great questions is by being a great listener.  If you are listening actively, you will recognize what information you are missing, or what comment requires clarification.  Below is a list of some basic types of questions to understand and master.

There is a general distinction between Open Ended Questions – questions that require some thought and more than a yes or no answer, and Close Ended Questions – questions that only require a specific answer or a yes/no answer.  This is an important distinction to understand and remember.  In the context of managing conflict, open-ended questions are utilized for information gathering and close-ended questions are used for clarifying concepts or ideas you have heard. Here are examples of these types of questions.

CLARIFYING QUESTIONS (Close-Ended Questions) 

  • Is this what you said…?
  • Did I hear you say…?
  • Did I understand you when you said…?
  • Did I hear you correctly when you said…?
  • Did I paraphrase what you said correctly?
  • So this took place on….?
  • So you would like to see…?

INFORMATION GATHERING QUESTIONS (Open Ended Questions)

  • If there was one small way that things could be better starting today, what would that be?
  • How did you feel when…?
  • How could you have handled it differently?
  • When did it begin?
  • When did you first notice…?
  • When did that happen?
  • Where did this happen?
  • What was that all about?
  • What happened then?
  • What would you like to do about it?
  • I want to understand from your perspective, would you please explain further?
  • What do you think would make this better going forward?
  • What criteria did you use to…?
  • What’s another way you might…?
  • What resources were used for the project?

 

A type of question to watch out for is Leading Questions, which provide a direction or answer.  An example of this would be, “So you are going to vote for____ for president, aren’t you?” or “What they did is unbelievably, don’t you agree?”  These questions can easily be turned into information-gathering questions, “Who are you going to vote for this year?” or “What do you this about their behavior?”

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Communication Skills in Early Childhood Education Copyright © 2024 by Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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