Instead of telling learners things, it seems you can ask them questions and somehow they are supposed to learn. What do people learn from being asked questions?
There is a famous incident in Plato’s dialogue with Meno, in which, by a sequence of questions, Meno’s uneducated slave boy is led to an apparent appreciation of how to construct a square double in area to a given square. It is often described as a typical Socratic dialogue and put forward as a useful form of teaching. But what does a learner get from being asked a sequence of questions?
The person asking the questions has some aims, some direction in mind; the person answering the questions is likely to be focused on answering the individual questions, but with no sense of where it is leading, or how the questioner knows to ask those particular questions.
Consequently, unless learners become aware of both how effective certain questions are, and what those questions are, they are unlikely to internalise those questions for themselves. [See Scaffolding & Fading].
Janet Ainley (1987 p25-26) pointed out that asking questions to which you already know the answer is rather peculiar except in an educational context. She distinguishes between
Genuine questions: asked because you actually want to know the answer;
Testing questions: asked when you want to find out if someone else knows something you know;
Provoking questions: asked when you want to draw someone’s attention to something that you think it would be beneficial for them to think about.
Often when you ask a question, it is only when you hear the response that you realise that you already had an answer in mind [Guess What’s In My Mind].
To convert a question from testing to a genuine question, it helps to be interested in what learners are thinking [Teaching By Listening].