The classroom method of Karl Kapp, Professor of Instructional Technology at Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania. Follow him on LinkedIn.
“Does anyone have any questions?” is probably the most often heard question in any classroom, live or virtual. It is also one of the least useful. It is a closed question, and the easiest answer to a closed question is “no.” Once a student takes the easy path and answers no, in their head or out loud, they are done thinking.
This piece is built around the practice of Karl Kapp, who teaches instructional technology and game design and has spent a career watching what gets learners to respond. What follows is his method, and why the tools most classrooms already have make it easy to run.
Why silence is not understanding
Early in his career, Kapp read the silence that followed “any questions?” as a good sign. It was not. “I wasn't getting quiet, understanding and enlightened students,” he says. “I was getting a bunch of people who decided to take the easy path.”
So he switched to a more open version: “What questions do you have?” Better, but it still hands the learner an enormous, undefined task. It asks them to scan everything you just covered, weigh it against what they already knew, and decide whether any of it produces a question. The silence was about the same as before.
A different strategy was needed. What eventually worked was a thinking question, one that makes the learner predict, decide, or apply knowledge. That kind of question leaves no room for a shrug or an easy no. The goal stops being “did they hear it” and becomes “can I get them to think about what I just covered.”
Why students stay quiet
Phrasing is not the only reason a room goes quiet, and knowing the other reasons lets you fix them.
First, students are often overloaded. We know the material so well that we forget it is their first time hearing it. An overloaded brain has no spare capacity to think; it can only absorb. Rush past the space students need to connect new information to what they already know, and there is nothing left over for a question.
Then there is the social cost. A student fears a classmate will think “the instructor already covered that,” or that the instructor will decide they were not listening. That fear shuts a student down before they have tried to reason anything out.
None of it gets fixed by asking “any questions?” louder or more often. What helps is psychological safety, said out loud. Kapp tells his students plainly: if you already knew the material, you would not be in this class, so no question is out of bounds. He also reframes what a missed point means. “Even if they were listening, they are also processing information, so things can get missed. Asking a question about something you missed does not mean you were not listening. It means you were processing information.”
Putting learners inside a decision
One technique Kapp leans on to force thinking is interactive storytelling. Instead of lecturing on a concept, he drops learners inside a scenario, walks them through it, and stops at decision points, four or five of them. At each stop he asks students what they would do, usually through an audience response system, then reveals the answer the majority chose. Because it is a live vote, nobody can opt out and nobody can just listen. Everyone has to land on an answer before he continues.
In his game design course he sets one up like this. You work for a studio building a game called Dragonmon GO. Your manager gives you two choices: tell players three things they need to know about capturing dragons, or let them start capturing dragons right away. Pick an answer.
The right answer is to let them start right away, because adult learners learn best once they have discovered they do not know something. Then comes the question that does the real work: why is that the right answer? “Getting learners to explain their reasoning does as much work as the original question,” Kapp says. “It's usually where I find out whether they reasoned it through or just are really good guessers.”
An audience response system carries this pattern well. Build the scenario across a few slides, put a โพลสด at each decision point, and have the room vote before you reveal what most people picked and why. The vote is the part that removes the exit; a student cannot coast through a decision they had to register an answer to.
Four kinds of thinking polls
Polling is Kapp's other main technique, but not yes-or-no polling. He uses four types, each one built to make a learner work something out before they see the answer rather than confirm they already knew it.
- คาดการณ์. What do you think happens next?
- การตัดสินใจ. Which option would you pick, and why?
- ความมั่นใจ. How sure are you: 10%, 40%, 100%?
- ใบสมัคร Where does this show up in your own work, or how would you apply this idea in a given situation?
Confidence is the type people underestimate. Low confidence with a wrong answer is fine; that is just someone still learning. High confidence with a wrong answer is a problem, because it usually means something was explained in a way that felt clear but skipped the thinking entirely. That is a signal to go back and cover the idea again.
In a live session these map cleanly onto the slide types you already have. Prediction, decision, and application run as ordinary polls where the class votes and the spread appears on screen. Confidence runs well as a มาตราส่วนการให้คะแนน, where students place themselves on a 10-to-100 line and you watch how the certainty is distributed, not just whether the answer was right. The value is the same in every case: the class commits before the reveal, so you are measuring thinking rather than nodding.
Think first, AI second
Kapp has started watching what AI is quietly doing to the brainstorming step of thinking. He asks students for risk-mitigation strategies on an e-learning project. They hand him good ones. Then he asks why they chose that strategy, and more and more he hears “I don't know.” An AI tool picked it, not them. The idea arrived without the thinking that should have produced it.
His rule now is think first, AI second. Brainstorm yourself, work through the problem, then use AI to add angles you had not considered, rather than to skip the thinking. Do not outsource your thinking to a machine. It is the same failure the polls are designed to catch, just triggered by a different bad shortcut.
Three questions worth asking instead
If you want a quick, low-effort replacement for “does anyone have any questions?”, these three do the job:
- What is one idea you could apply tomorrow, at work, or in your next class?
- What part of this seems most useful to you?
- Explain this back in your own words.
That last one Kapp picked up years ago, when an instructor had the class draw a model he had just taught, then teach it to the person next to them. “Why,” Kapp remembers thinking, “you just taught this, everyone already knows it.” Then he had to teach it, and found out everything he did not know. Teaching forces you to think a concept through in a way listening never does. His partner taught it back, and the model got richer both times.
Try one thing tomorrow
Find the one place you would normally ask “any questions?” and replace it with something that makes a learner think instead of just answer. You will not cover as much content. But you will find out, in real time, what students learned, and so will they, because they will have worked it out themselves. Over time the room gets more confident and more comfortable asking questions and thinking, which is the whole point.
The tools for this are not exotic. A scenario, a few decision points, four kinds of poll, and a room that has to vote before it sees the answer. What changes is not the technology. It is the question.
