Learning to question – workshops and tools for schools
Workshops
Teachers agree: critical thinking and curiosity are the skills that must take center stage in an age of disinformation, hallucinating AIs and authoritarian politics. A recent study confirms this (Leibovitch et al., 2025). But it also shows that teachers are often unsure how to actually teach these key competencies.
Questions are a powerful tool for critique and innovation. Those who know how to ask questions
- get answers that help them make informed decisions;
- can challenge the status quo and drive change;
- can imagine 'what if?' and develop something new;
- can use artificial intelligence in a confident and self-directed way.
How does critical thinking work?
Duration
2 lessons (90 min.)Level
Grades 5–12Cost
voluntary contributionFlyer
Students practise the art of questioning and critical thinking step by step — and then submit their questions directly to researchers on savoir public.
How far can the state go?
Duration
2 lessons (90 min.)Level
Grades 9–12Cost
voluntary contributionFlyer
Students explore the past — guided by researchers from the NRP 76 on 'welfare and coercion'.
What does Baselland know?
Duration
2 lessons (90 min.)Level
Grades 10–12Cost
voluntary contributionFlyer
Students explore the knowledge landscape of their canton — and help shape it. Which experts, institutions and topics must absolutely be on the map?
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David Hackett Fischer
Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970)Digital question tools
Our free tools help teachers and students formulate questions — directly in the browser, no sign-up required.
The question prism
Duration
1 minuteIdeal for
When a question already exists but is still too narrowEffort
Benefit
A question is broken down into surprising variants — new perspectives in seconds.
Granularity check
Duration
2–10 minutesIdeal for
Final thesis, project work at upper secondary levelEffort
Benefit
Is the question feasible? The tool checks the focus and depth of a research question.
Find your question
Duration
8 minutesIdeal for
Introduction to a topic, preparation for a final thesisEffort
Benefit
Step by step to a precise research question — using the proven Question Formulation Technique.
Why we care about questions. Reason 1
Children ask questions. Toddlers even more than 100 per hour. Step by step, they expand their inner map and compare it with the world of adults.
But the older they get, the quieter their curiosity becomes – not because they know everything, but because they forget how to ask questions.
Why we care about questions. Reason 2
“The most powerful learning technology is the ability to ask questions.”
Dan Rothstein
Right Question Institute (2018)People who have forgotten how to ask questions find it difficult later on to participate in educational and decision-making processes.
For asking questions always also means challenging what exists. Without questions, there is no progress, no innovation, no future.
Why we care about questions. Reason 3
“The LLM group's participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring.”
MIT Media Lab
Your Brain on ChatGPT (2025)With ChatGPT and similar tools, answers are available in seconds. But when unclear questions are answered immediately, there is no incentive to refine them or seek new perspectives.
This turns us into consumers of answers instead of architects of good questions – with measurable effects on our thinking, as shown by the MIT Media Lab.
Our approach
The Art of Asking Questions
Here’s the good news: Like writing or cooking, the ability to ask good questions is a cultural technique. It can be practiced and learned. Starting in autumn, we will develop two concrete offerings:
- Workshops for teachers: Together with teachers, we train how to practice questioning as a cultural technique and how AI can be used constructively.
- School visits: We come directly into the classroom and explore with students formats in which asking questions becomes an adventure.