{"ops":[{"insert":"The quality of your life is determined by the quality of our thinking. The quality of your thinking, in turn, is determined by the quality of your questions, for questions are the engine, the driving force behind thinking. Without questions, you have nothing to think about. Without essential questions, you may fail to focus your thinking on the significant and substantive.\n\nWhen you ask essential questions, you deal with what is necessary, relevant, and indispensable to a matter at hand. You recognize what is at the heart of the matter. Your thinking is grounded and disciplined. You are ready to learn. You are intellectually able to find your way about.\n\nTo be successful in life, you need to ask essential questions: essential questions when reading, writing, and speaking; when shopping, working, and parenting; when forming friendships, choosing life-partners, and when interacting with the mass media and the Internet.\n\nYet few people are masters of the art of asking essential questions. Most have never thought about why some questions are crucial and others peripheral. Essential questions are rarely studied in school. They are rarely modeled at home. Most people question according to their psychological associations. Their questions are haphazard and scattered.\n\nEssential questions fall into a range of categories. Some essential questions are principally analytic, some principally evaluative. Some apply predominantly to academic subjects, others to our innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.\n\nThe categories and lists of essential questions you will find in "},{"attributes":{"underline":true,"italic":true,"bold":true,"link":"https://community.criticalthinking.org/viewDocument.php?doc=../content/library_for_educators/136/Thinker__sGuidetotheArtofAskingEssentialQuestions.pdf&page=1"},"insert":"The Thinker’s Guide to Asking Essential Questions"},{"insert":" will help you develop your understanding of how to ask essential questions. Recognize that the questions in this guide are illustrative, not exhaustive. Furthermore, the ideas provided in the guide are useful only to the extent that you employ them daily to formulate and pursue essential questions. Practice in asking essential questions eventually leads to the habit of asking essential questions. But you can never practice asking essential questions if you have no conception of them.\n\nTo understand the important role of questions in thinking, you must first realize that it is not possible to be a good thinker and a poor questioner. Questions define tasks, express problems, and delineate issues. They drive thinking forward. Answers, on the other hand, often signal a full stop in thought. Only when an answer generates further questions does thought continue as inquiry. A mind with no questions is a mind that is not intellectually alive. No questions (asked) equals no understanding (achieved). Superficial questions equal superficial understanding, unclear questions equal unclear understanding. In short, if your mind is not actively generating questions, you are not engaged in substantive learning or substantive thinking.\n\nThinking within disciplines is driven, not by answers, but by essential questions. Had no basic questions been asked by those who laid the foundation for a field — for example, physics or biology — the field would not have been developed in the first place. Every intellectual field is born out of a cluster of essential questions that drive the mind to pursue particular facts and understandings. Biology was born when some humans pursued answers to the questions:\n\n“What are the characteristics of living systems? What structures exist in them? What functions do these structures serve?” Biochemistry was born when biologists began to ask questions such as: “What chemical processes underlie living things? How and why do chemical processes within living things interact and change?”"},{"attributes":{"indent":1},"insert":"\n"},{"insert":"\nEvery field stays alive only to the extent that fresh questions are generated and taken seriously as the driving force in thinking. When a field of study is no longer pursuing significant answers to essential questions, it dies as a field. To think through or rethink anything, one must ask the questions necessary to thinking through the logic of that thing, clearly and precisely.\n\nAgain, our "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"Thinker’s Guide to Asking Essential Questions"},{"insert":" will help you develop your questioning abilities in all aspects of your life. In this guide, we introduce essential questions as indispensable intellectual tools. We focus on principles essential to formulating, analyzing, assessing, and settling primary questions. You will notice that our categories of question types are not exclusive. There is a great deal of overlap between them. Deciding what category of question to ask at any point in thinking is a matter of judgment. Having a range of powerful questions to choose from is a matter of knowledge.\n\nBecause you cannot be skilled at thinking unless you are skilled at questioning, you should strive for a state of mind in which fundamental questions become second nature. These questions are indispensable to productive thinking, deep learning, and effective living.\n\nI hope you will bring your questions to Dr. Gerald Nosich at our next open QA focused on questions from our community and the public, to be held November 15"},{"attributes":{"script":"super"},"insert":"th"},{"insert":", 2023, at 10:00 a.m. PST. In our regular question-and-answer webinars, we open the floor to your questions about critical thinking and its unlimited applications to human life and beyond. Join Dr. Nosich for this webinar - and ask your questions! "},{"attributes":{"underline":true,"bold":true,"link":"https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventReg?oeidk=a07ek1tsoy5aa44bb7f&oseq=&c=&ch="},"insert":"Register here"},{"insert":".\n\n---\n\nPart of this blog was adapted from "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"The Thinker’s Guide to Asking Essential Questions"},{"insert":" by Linda Elder and Richard Paul, 2019, Rowman & Littlefield.\n"}]}