How to Ask Brilliant Questions that Get Results

How can you easily make your guided museum experiences more engaging and more interactive? By asking brilliant questions that get results.

When you ask insightful, well-worded questions AND make your participants feel comfortable enough to answer them (employ those facilitation skills), you are creating a ‘community of inquiry.’ 

But how do you ask brilliant questions?

This is a subject that has followed me around over the last 9 years as I’ve spoken to guides all over the world grappling to get to grips with phrasing questions in the best way possible. So, let’s try and simplify it to 4 golden rules (and 1 shortcut!) :

1. Know the difference between open-ended and closed questions and when to use them

A closed question can be answered with either a single word or a short phrase (either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answers, or brief, factual information). 

An open-ended question invites many possible answers and therefore encourages & jump starts discussion. 

a) Closed questions are useful for finding out information.  On a museum programme you can use closed questions to find out more about your participants. Use them in your 4 part introduction and throughout your guided experience to check in with your guests and to remind yourself of information about your group.

However, use sparingly! Too many closed questions in a row can make a person feel like they are being put on the spot or being interviewed, so try not to ask more than 2 or 3 closed questions in a row.

Also, beware of asking closed questions that ask for recall of specific information (such as ‘Does anyone known in what year was slavery abolished in the Netherlands?’ ). Worse still would be add on to the end ‘You all know this! You did this at school’.

[This actually happened on a tour that I was participating in – unfortunately I hadn’t covered this in my school and nor had the rest of the group. None of us felt very good about not knowing this ‘obvious’ question and were reluctant to speak for the rest of the tour. Worth noting – do not assume your group has any prior knowledge of ANY of the subjects you are covering. You need to find out their individual levels (as much as possible) and adjust your content accordingly. ]

These types of closed recall questions lead to ‘Guess-what’s-in-my-head’ teaching.

Guess-what’s-in-my-head (GWIMH) teaching is when educators use questions to check whether certain answers or ideas have been remembered. It’s a test of memory rather than of understanding. In GWIMH teaching, the educator asks questions that seek predetermined correct responses. These are not questions rooted in genuine curiosity. 

GWIMH teaching can create an environment where participants feel pressured to guess what the educator wants to hear rather than genuinely engaging with the material.

In museum and gallery programmes, GWIMH teaching is symptomatic of what I call ‘performative participation’ – asking questions to encourage surface-level interaction, rather than out of genuine curiosity or desire to spark meaningful dialogue.

It will only lead to certain group members answering (if indeed anyone knows the answer) and will do nothing to open up a discussion. It becomes a ‘who knows the answer’ session and those who don’t know the answer end up feeling considerably less smarter than the guide (which is never a good feeling).

Avoid questioning table tennis. Instead you are looking for chatting, wondering, puzzling and discussing. 

💡Tip: Start to pay attention to the questions you are asking your participants on a guided tour. How many closed questions do you ask in a row? Did you just ask a closed-ended question when an open-ended question would have yielded more information for both parties? Don’t worry if you find yourself asking a closed-ended question, you can always open it up at the end for example, ‘If so, please tell me in what ways’.

b) Open-ended questions promote longer answers that originate from knowledge, thoughts, feelings, and experiences. They don’t put people on the spot, instead they allow participants to reveal more or less about themselves, depending on how comfortable they are feeling. They have no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or predictable answers.

Open questions begin with words such as: ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘describe’, ‘explain’, ‘tell me’:

• What interests you about …?
• What do you notice about…?
• What are the reasons…?
• What if I was to say….?
• What questions does that raise for you?
• What would change if…?
• What other explanation might there be?
• How would it be different if… ?
• How would you describe (this colour, this object etc)?
• How might this be used? How might this have been used?
• Why do you say that?
• Why do you think….
• Why do you think this has been put together this way?
• To what extent do you agree?

The beauty of using open-ended questions is that as people reveal more about their thoughts, they give you more information about which to pose more questions…

💡Tip: think about creating a ‘question of the week’. Then try and use that question as often as possible with groups during that time. After you’ve asked the question, then show interest in the participant’s response by asking follow-up questions like, ‘Tell me more’ and ‘What (did you see that) made you say that?’

2. Use the CONDITIONAL

One of the easiest ways to make questions more open-ended and get answers is to use the conditional in your questions. Use words like think, could, would or might.

They signal that there are many ways to answer the question and typically the answers themselves stimulate more questions. 

There is a huge difference between asking someone ‘What is it?’ and ‘What do you think it might be?’

3. Add a STRUCTURE to your questions

Once you start to feel more confident using open-ended questions (and you will, but give yourself TIME to practice phrasing questions in this way so that it becomes a regular part of your practice) you can then add a structure to your questioning to help you think about when to ask what questions.

Sometimes you won’t get an answer to your questions because you’re asking too much or and if it’s too much, too soon. People need a chance to get warmed up, to get to know their environment, the group they are with and YOU before they feel comfortable answering.

So asking that big blue sky question right off the bat is only going to get you crickets…or tumbleweed silence…You need a structure. You also don’t want your carefully crafted open-ended questions to tumble out in any old order. You want the discussion to be a rounded whole rather than a loose muddle of open-ended questions.

I like to plan all my discussions on a museum programme according to the Discussion Cycle from the Thinking Museum® Approach. 

A well-rounded discussion on a guided experience begins with observation and description, before moving on to interpreting meaning and significance and finally, drawing conclusions and insights.

💡Tip: Choose an artwork or object. Create a list of open-ended questions for that object/stop based on the categories above. Start with observation and noticing questions, before you move on to interpretation questions and end with some questions that summarise and conclude. 

4. Don’t forget to FOLLOW UP

When you receive an answer to a question, don’t forget to respond and follow up. Your responses should be non-judgemental and open. You could say something like, ‘That’s interesting, what else?’, ‘What (did you see that) made you say that?’ or ‘Could you give me an example of where you see or why you felt that?’ If you don’t understand the response, ask a question for more information to clarify.

Make sure that you take the time, not just to hear, but to really understand and value what participants have said to you.

5. The Shortcut – use Questioning Practices

Questioning frameworks and protocols are often used in museum programmes to support educators in formulating and sequencing questions to guide inquiry-based discussion. These tools are used to aid questioning, organise discussions, delve into content, objects, or ideas, and engage audiences.

In a questioning framework, the questions are carefully worded to allow for multiple interpretations and to open up discussions. The more you use these structures, the more they become second-nature. The more they become second-nature, the easier it is for you to word your questions in the same way. Regular use will help you to phrase brilliant questions. However,  you do have to use the frameworks regularly so that you become used to them.

I’ve developed a repertoire of 10 Questioning Practices especially for use on guided experiences on museums for the Thinking Museum® Approach. You can find them in my book The Art Engager: Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums.

You can always foster participation and interaction by asking questions. Encourage your participants to be active rather than passive. You will go to unexpected places and sometimes go off on tangents by asking these sorts of questions – but that’s OK, because in any case we shouldn’t be doing everything according to a script. Use your questions as catalysts, encouraging your participants to discover, ponder and reflect. You’ll find that both you and your participants will have a more enjoyable, memorable and unique experience.

Next time we’ll focus on 9 common mistakes to avoid make when asking questions!

Masterclass: The Art of Questioning

If you’d like to be taken step-by-step through the process of improving your questioning technique with tools and exercises to help you consistently create, sort & evaluate your own brilliant questions (that will delight and engage your audience), take my special 45 minute recorded masterclass.

You will:

✔️Learn about the different types of questions and when to use them

✔️Learn simple yet powerful ways to generate, formulate, sort and evaluate questions in response to prompts, artworks and images

✔️Learn to analyse, track & reflect on your own questions, turn closed into open questions (and vice versa)

✔️Finally you will learn new tools, techniques and activities that you can use regularly to perfect your questioning technique

When you purchase this class, you will receive a link to the recording and all the resources (class workbook, slides and PDFs) that go with the class. The class is packed with exercises and practical examples for you to do.