The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Tiruchi News : Learning lateral thinking with the art of questioning

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jul 10, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Tiruchi

Learning lateral thinking with the art of questioning

S. Aishwarya

NIE session kindled students’ inquisitiveness to delve deep into a subject

— Photo: R. Ashok

Curious: Booma Venkatesan, a resource person of NIE, handles the session at the Railway Mixed School in Tiruchi.

TIRUCHI: Pick up an orange or apple from your nearby grocery shop. What possible queries flash in your mind? The taste, colour or perhaps the richness of the pulp, but if you could take time to ponder a bit more, you could learn about the fruit better. This was the message put across to class VII students at the recent NIE session held at Railway Mixed Higher Secondary School (English).

The session, popularly known to the students as ‘apple-orange’ session, was the first module of speaking skills.

The students were taught to analyse, associate and apply the learnt information by the way of questioning. Questions on apple or orange, for instance, end with specific and comprehensive details about the fruit.

Levels of questioning

This, the resource person called, as the primary level of questioning.

The higher level dealt with analysing the features of the fruit, applying its characteristics in different situation (‘how to peel an orange without getting our hands sticky?’) and synthesis (‘how would the hybrid of apple and orange look like?’).

Precisely, it was all about lateral thinking.

The session aimed at kindling the inquisitiveness of students to collect the relevant detail before dealing with a subject.

The art of questioning could help them to discover the commonly overlooked feature of the subject, the students were told.

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