Love is one of the few words in the human dictionary that has no clear definition. It is an ignorance of knowing and a force of feeling that keeps humans in a state of churning and longing, no matter what they encounter in the natural world. In universal and historical human experience, it has become painfully clear that love is not to be found in the physical, in direct contact with our senses. Love is frustratingly immaterial, and material things have failed time and time again to satisfy the spiritual and mental lust that have produced this “sacred” notion. Love has no business anywhere, except the transcendental and the a priori. But as it possesses physical beings, love must also have an attachment to the material world. For humans, love must be an attraction to a beauty of perfection that is beyond the physical but partly manifest in it. Apart from this point, which is agreed upon by many seekers of truth and wisdom, any further details have been unresolved.

Is love the end or is it just the means to an end? In Plato’s Symposium, love—or eros, as it is called—is discussed by several people who are unable to give a whole enough definition to satisfy Socrates, the final speaker. According to Plato, love in its true and best form goes beyond romantic and erotic love. It is not merely sexual attraction or the emotional bond in a human relationship, hence the popular term Platonic love. It has a higher, truer form than physical affection. In Socrates’s words, love is neither knowledge nor ignorance but something in between. It is neither poverty nor wealth but something in between. It represents the lack of something good and beautiful but at the same time, holds the wisdom and passion to attain it.

Humans can only feel love for things they do not have. The object of love has to be beauty—the greater the beauty, the greater the love. In order to feel and practice the best love, Socrates argues that one should look for higher forms of beauty; the highest beauties should be those that leave the physical and join the abstract and divine. He calls love or eros a daemon or a being of a nature between the divine and the natural. This indicates that love is a messenger between heaven and earth, a carrier that serves as the tether for humans to the abstract     and spiritual, to a beauty of perfection and to something higher and more meaningful than themselves and the world around them. Once this is realized, Socrates continues to explain that the object of love then needs to shift from beauty to the good. Love needs to become a desire for the good to be one’s own. Once love is directed at the perfect beauty, it needs to shift to the ultimate higher good for it to be complete and attain virtue. Love is the yearning for the true and divine form of Beauty, and its ultimate goal is the true and divine form of the Good, both of which exist in and of themselves, in accordance with the Platonic perception of forms. Socrates makes this point abundantly clear, as he argues that true love longs for an ultimate divine form of beauty and good.

Once Socrates explains the object and nature of love, he moves on to describe the act of love or eros. Love needs to lead to an action towards the object of its focus or desire. However, rather than possessing beauty, love is wanting to give birth in beauty. Love is the desire to engender or bring birth from what is beautiful. According to Socrates, experiencing and feeling beauty helps the lover give birth to something. In other terms, being in beauty or within the presence of beauty causes one to give birth to that which is the end result that love longs for.

In its most simple, crude form, this suggests intercourse with a physically beautiful body, thus giving birth to a child. But Socrates claims that there are higher forms of birth, just like there are higher forms of beauty, and the desire for one in the other arouses higher forms of love or eros. The object of love—beauty—becomes the means to a greater end, the birth. Giving birth grants a form of immortality, the highest form of existence, to the birth giver or the pregnant. Whenever the pregnant comes near beauty, they become glad, rejoice, dissolve, and produce offspring by giving birth. In a way, one who is beautiful releases the pregnant from labor pains through this divine act of love.

The offspring may come in many forms with ranging values and elevate the birth giver or the lover to a state of immortality, the level of which ranges according to the level of the offspring, the beauty, and the love. This indicates that the higher the love and beauty, the greater the offspring, and the greater the immortality. Therefore, the lover should always naturally look for the highest and best beloved in order to give birth to the best offspring and attain the highest attribute of immortality, something that all humans desire in a temporary, finite world. Once more, this shows how love always looks for something greater, higher, and outside of the physical world. Love is a desire for something it doesn’t possess. Ultimately, the only thing humans find themselves lacking or unable to have, is the divine perfection of good, something abstract and supernatural. As it is an impossibility in the physical, natural world, there exists a spirit of eros that knows wisely enough of this beauty but is too impoverished and worldly to reach it completely. This eros has nothing to do but possess the poor mortals and help them realize the true beauty.

Socrates gives a guide on how to do just that. He argues that a person needs to start by loving the beauty they are able to see around them, and, one by one, learn to recognize a higher level of beauty and redirect their love accordingly. To clarify, the lover needs to start feeling love for lesser beauties, and then pass on gradually to a love for higher beauties.

As this happens, one should naturally feel contempt for lesser beauty and aspire only for higher beauty. For example, a person should first feel love for a specific beautiful body, move up to love of all physical bodies, then move to a love of beautiful minds, then elevate to love the beauty of knowledge, then have a love for wisdom and continue on until the ultimate beauty and the ultimate good are reached. At each rung of this ladder of love, the lover should give birth to an offspring in the beloved, whether that is a child, a discovery of truth, or an idea in someone’s head. In the pursuit of love to behold the beautiful, a person should help the ones they behold, including themself, become more beautiful, so their love can magnify as beauty falls out of previous reach. In conclusion, Socrates explains this process of love to make the grand point that love in its entirety and true form, is a desire for the highest beauty and good, existing outside of the physical world. All other intermediate things are veils and stones, obstructing the way.

Love is the heart churning for what is higher and greater than what it possesses. It is a paradoxical state of neediness and fulfillment that drives the lover mad in the pursuit of the highest beloved. Just like Majnun, the true lover becomes insane as they wander in the desert, knowing and yearning for its Layla but never being able to possess it. According to Plato, humans are trapped in the desert of the physical and material while desiring the abstract and divine even though it is out of their reach. From this arises the origin of love. Socrates is just one in a long list of lovers in the painful pursuit of the highest and perfect beauty and good, existing outside of the natural realm, in a higher place that is divine, abstract, and spiritual. Love is what pulls us up, as our feet keep us down.

A question can be defined as any sentence that has an interrogative form or function (Cotton 1988). Asking and answering questions are among the most common human behaviors we experience in many different areas of our lives (Samson, Syrowsky, Weinstein, & Walberg 1987). For instance, as mentioned in Sahin and Kulm (2008)’s study, questions have been used for many purposes such as provoking students and making them listen carefully, analyzing their thoughts and thinking critically. Moreover, the questioning method serves to initiate discussion and review material. Unsurprisingly, research has found that classroom talks are dominated by teachers’ questions (Redfield & Rousseau 1981). Indeed, teachers use anywhere from 35 to 50 percent of their instructional time posing questions (Cotton 1998). Thus questioning is a common and pivotal teaching skill which needs special attention for maximum benefit. Additionally, the type of questions teachers ask and how often these questions are posed to students also needs examining.

Question types

The questioning method has been a well-studied topic in education for centuries because it has been thought to be a good measure of a teacher’s quality (Stevens 1912). Therefore, a number of studies have taken place to examine the types of questions asked by teachers. Even though different categorizations have been set out in various researches, it is possible to see that there are several types of questions studied most and these include: higher-order, open-ended, divergent, evaluative, lower-order, factual, convergent, closed, and procedural questions. But when looked at these questions closely, it is possible to group them under two categories, probing and factual, based on the answers you expect from your students. The first group of categorization might include higher-order, open-ended, divergent, and evaluative question types under probing since all those question types require students to think deeply, provide wider responses, and justify answers. Indeed, Sahin and Kulm (2008) found that probing question was like the first group of question types requiring the following:

• Asking students to explain or elaborate on their thoughts
• Asking students to use prior knowledge and apply it to the current problem or idea
• Asking students to justify or prove their ideas (p. 3).

Examples of probing questions include:

1. How do you know that these fractions, 3/7 and 9/21, are equivalent?
2. Why do you agree with your friend?
3. How do you know that your answer is right?
4. What if you were in his shoes, what would you do to stop him from stealing?
5. If you were the President of the United States, would you liberate Libya? Why or why not?

The second group consists of lower-order, convergent, closed, and procedural questions that require students to recall specific facts and provide short answers. Sahin and Kulm’s (2008) study described indicators of factual questions which was very similar to the second group of questions:

• Asking students for a specific fact or definition (Vacc 1993)
• Asking students for an answer to an exercise
• Asking students to provide the next step in a procedure.

Examples of factual questions include:

1. What is the definition of a ratio?
2. When is the Independence Day of America?
3. What do you get when you divide 16 by 4?
4. Do you agree with him?
5. How many blue chocolate candies do you have in your M&M bag?

In practice, 60 to 80 percent of teachers’ questions are factual and around 20 percent of them are probing questions according to Cotton (1998). So it is important for teachers to be knowledgeable about those questions types.

How to develop questioning skills

Cotton (1998) found that teachers’ questioning method was the second most used teaching skill after lecturing in K-12 education. This is an interesting finding because even though it is used widely in teaching, research shows that teachers receive little training on how to ask, what to ask, and when to ask questions and how much time they need to wait after they pose a question. For instance, Sahin (2011) found that training or workshops on questioning was not a common practice in Texas. Four teachers said that they never took a course or a workshop specifically focusing on questioning and wait time. Interestingly, they said that they still used different questions to teach what they teach. When they were asked how they developed their questioning skills, they attributed it to watching and observing a good teacher as the number one technique to learn how to ask questions.

Another common method to learn how to pose questions is going out in the field and working in a classroom with real teachers and students as described by a middle grades mathematics teacher:

When I was an undergraduate, the time in the classroom, the classroom experience, going out in the field, being in the classroom with actual teachers and helping them out, seeing how they are doing it. You pick up things and you get exposed to different strategies in the classroom. So, I think, having the exposure in the classrooms is very beneficial because you are taught a lot with a lecture at A&M or at any college but real life exposure out in the classrooms with real kids, what kind of questions kids are asking and how they are responding to the questions, I think, is very helpful (Sahin 2011, 39).

Also the importance of workshops on questioning techniques and wait time cannot be ignored since teachers tend to and are encouraged to attend workshops regularly to grow and become better teachers. But Sahin’s findings illustrate that teachers cannot locate a specific workshop on questioning. There was only one teacher who said that she attended a workshop on teachers’ questioning method in her fifteen years of teaching. So, trainings or workshops on different teaching skills should be organized and teachers should be highly encouraged to attend a certain number of professional development workshops each school year.

Wait time

Questions and wait time are two sides of the same coin. As a coin cannot be valid without one of the sides, questioning techniques will not be successful without sufficient wait time. More precisely, you may ask quality and timely questions to your students but it will not extract learning unless you provide them with enough time to absorb and process the question and produce an answer. Cotton (1998), in her review on questioning and wait time, defined wait time as “the amount of time the teacher allows to elapse after he/she has posed a question and before a student begins to speak” (p. 5). Interestingly, research shows that the average wait time teachers allow students to generate response is one second or less (Rowe 1974). Naturally, no one can expect students to understand a question, process it, and formulate a response in such a short period of time.

Increasing a wait time of three or more seconds is an immense improvement for better responses and eventually for more effective student learning. Studies such as Cazden (2001) have revealed that three or more seconds of wait time help students give longer responses, provide better responses with more evidence of learning, further elaboration, encourage more questioning, and added engagement with increased student-to-student and student-to-teacher interactions. This is why it is crucial for teachers to go through trainings to develop proper wait time habits encouraging further student learning.

The use of questioning skills in daily life

Scholars, religious leaders, and/or prophets can be categorized as teachers as well since they are in a position to communicate to people certain things by lecturing, preaching, or posing questions. In that sense, Socrates was not alone in his use of questioning techniques to teach something or convince someone about a misunderstood value. The following story presents an excellent example of a well-constructed questioning method with enough wait time. In the story, Turkish scholar Said Nursi talks about how wrong or exaggerated fear can make one’s life unbearable:

An important man (may God’s mercy be upon him) was afraid to travel by boat. One evening, we went to Galata bridge to take the ferry to Eyup. He did not want to get on, saying that he feared he would drown. When I asked him how many boats were in the Golden Horn, he replied that there might be as many as one thousand. When I asked him how many boats sank each year, he replied usually one or two, and sometimes none. I made this analogy: “Since a year has 365 days, your chance of drowning is 1:365,000. Why does such a small chance scare you?” I asked: “How much longer do you expect to live?” He answered: “Maybe 10 years; I am old already.” I continued: “As there are 3,650 days in 10 years, your chance of dying today is 1:3,650. But since we do not know when we will die, you could die at any time. So repent and weep! Write your last will and testament!” Seeing the truth in my words, he got on the boat even though trembling. (Nursi 2007, 401-2)

In the example, Nursi uses a series of questions to help a person overcome his fear of boarding a boat. In this example, Nursi achieved a couple of things through questioning: first, he asked a series of (factual) questions to help the person determine his underlying beliefs about death. Nursi formulated this information in such a way to show the man how small the possibility of a boat sinking was through a set of factual questions. He posed each question cleverly and effectively to help the person realize how his feelings of death were exaggerated. Also, Nursi gave his addressee enough time to think about the questions, use prior knowledge and apply it to a current problem or situation. He did not rush him to give answers. Moreover, the information Nursi obtained was not something that his addressee did not know, rather it was a tool to help the person overcome his fear of death when boarding a boat. In a short period of time, Nursi persuaded the person that his fear was needless through the use of a questioning technique combined with adequate wait time. As Myhill and Dunkin (2002) stated, “Just like a good barrister, a good teacher knows how to use questions for maximum impact” (p. 8).

In conclusion, teachers’ questioning skills are one of the primary and most influential set of pedagogical skills in use in classrooms. Therefore, teachers should be trained in order for them to become knowledgeable about what to ask and how to ask. Additionally, teachers should know that they should wait at least three seconds after posing a question for more effective student responses and understanding. Teachers’ questioning skills and wait time should complement each other for better outcome. Colleges, districts, and schools should seek ways to improve both prospective and in-service teachers’ questioning skills.

References

• Cazden, C. B. 2001. Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Cotton, K. 1998. Classroom questioning. North West Regional Educational Laboratory. Retrieved from http://www.learner.org/workshops/socialstudies/pdf/session6/6.ClassroomQuestioning.pdf
• Nursi, Bediüzzaman Said. 2007. The Letters. NJ: Tughra Books.
• Myhill, D., & Dunkin, F. 2002. What is a good question? Literacy, 8.
• Redfield, D. L., & Rousseau, E. W. 1981. A meta-analysis of experimental research on teacher questioning behavior. Review of Educational Research 51, 237–245.
• Sahin, A. 2011. Teachers’ awareness and acquisition of questioning. (Manuscript submitted for publication).
• Sahin, A., & Kulm, G. 2008. Sixth grade mathematics teachers. Intentions and use of probing, guiding, and factual questions. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 11(3), 221-241
• Samson, G. E., Strykowski, B., Weinstein, T., & Walberg, H. J. 1987. The effects of teacher questioning levels on student achievement. Journal of Educational Research 80, 290–295.
• Socrates.(n.d.).Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates
• Stevens, R. 1912. The questions as a measure of efficiency in instruction: A critical study of classroom practice, Teachers College Contributions to Education, 48, 95. New York: Columbia University, Teachers College Press.
• Vacc, N. N. 1993. Implementing the professional standards for teaching mathematics: Questioning in the mathematics classroom. Arithmetic Teacher, 41(2), 88–91.