ABSTRACT
Questioning is a key feature of athlete/student-centred approaches to coaching and teaching but presents a significant challenge for practitioners. The importance of questioning for learning can be traced back to the Greek philosopher Socrates, who believed that questioning was the only form of defensible teaching. By structuring opportunities for questioning and encouraging the ‘debate of ideas’, the coach can facilitate improvements in the athletes’ problem-solving capabilities through their interaction with one another. S. Kagan’s categorization of questions into those that are ‘skinny’ or ‘fat’, ‘high consensus’ or ‘low consensus’, and ‘review’ or ‘true’ is a handy way of exploring the best questions to ask. Skinny questions require a ‘yes’/‘no’ type of answer and little thinking on the part of the student. Grehaigne et al. provide a list of generic questions for small teams of learners to lead their own ‘tactical timeouts’ through what they term the ‘debate of ideas’.
