Acting Doctor

Graphic credit: adventuresincommoncore.blogspot.com

This may come as a shock, but not every moment of parenting is filled with heroic deeds, warm hugs or high fives. There are tasks we parents do that won’t be making it to the big screen any time soon. One of those tasks is the parent-teacher meeting. It’s probably a good thing that this event won’t be a summer blockbuster. Not sure how many people would go and see the movie “Parent-Teacher Meeting: Goals Defined!”

And so it was that I drove over to my son’s school and sat down in his Math class, looking forward to meeting his teacher, but expecting a fairly generic description of the goals for the term ahead. But Mr. M surprised us all and instead whipped out a Math word problem for us to solve. But instead of jumping straight to a calculation, he got us to ask two questions “What do I notice?” and “What do I wonder?” This is the approach he takes with the students because of a growing revelation in education that many students do not know how to effectively approach verbal problems. They leap to calculation before really  understanding the problem. Asking what you notice and what you wonder first relieves you of the pressure to instantly be right and simply allows you to take in the information and process the problem in a non-linear way.

If there is one feeling you have in medicine, it’s the pressure to be instantly right. Even now, while I’m on research leave, I felt I needed to be correct when asked what I thought of the results I had just assembled for one of my research projects. But interestingly, my research group leader  used almost identical phrasing to Mr. M, the math teacher. She simply asked, when we were looking at the data tables, “What do you notice?” We are evaluating the literature to determine the effectiveness of a certain modality for treating nerve injury. I noticed that one muscle group seemed to improve much more than the others with this treatment. Why? (What do you wonder?) Could it really be that you can approach an 8th grade Math problem and a Neurosurgical research article with the same two questions?

And if so, where else could those questions be used effectively to solve problems?

What if spouses took the time to notice and wonder about each other? On second thought, there is probably a lot of noticing and wondering that goes on already “I notice you’ve walked onto the carpet with dirty shoes” “I’m wondering which couch you’d like to sleep on” but what if these questions were asked from a place of renewed curiosity and possibility?

With parents and children.

With employees and employers.

With ourselves.

We can get to the point where everything is about bottom lines and definitive answers. We stop noticing and worse, stop wondering. At that point, innovation is stymied, relationships stagnate and personal growth is stunted.

I first broached this question on Twitter earlier this week. As it happened, I have a mischievous friend who responded with a few notice/wonder questions of his own. I will leave you with one of his cheeky creations . . .

What do I notice? I can’t feel my foot

What do I wonder? If this crocodile will let go soon . . .