Negotiating comfort levels with open questions

I am a huge fan of open questions.

I have held the set of beliefs that reinforces the benefits of asking a good question (and getting students to ask them as well).  Ultimately, the thinking piece is what it's all about.  The "math" (or what is falsely perceived as math) doesn't matter.  And I believe that open questions do this.  I've written about open questions a bit a year ago, emphasizing the importance of open ended questions.

But all beliefs stand to be challenged.

I naturally ask a lot of questions.  I think too much.  I think about something, and question myself, and those questions spawn more questions, and even in discussions those questions turn into potential answers which churn out even more questions.  I like doing this.  I enjoy the complexity of topics due to questioning.  (which sparked this post when I didn't get to have that conversation with someone).

But I am now questioning about this process of questioning.

This school year has been a strange ride for me.  Besides having a bunch of additional responsibilities that I've taken on this year, I picked up the teaching course one at a time.  I didn't start out with a full teaching load - they came individually later on.  In any case, one of the classes I am currently teaching is a grade 12 college preparation course.  For any non-Canadian readers, these are students in the "non-academic" (such a terrible stigmatic description, but I can't think of any other descriptors).

I have been juggling several different issues with respect to my teaching beliefs.  I am sure I will get to more of this later.  One of these beliefs relates to my belief that open questions encourage deeper thinking of mathematics.  Not only this, some students struggled with the project-based approaches to math education.

Let me elaborate.

A student has great difficulty with starting questions that have no definite answer.  Questions like "Why..." or "How might..."  He/She has a lot of problems knowing where to start, and prefer to have a "set method" of approaching mathematics.  i.e. give me a formula and let me follow it.  I have tried to emphasize the importance of developing an approach for solving a problem especially when you don't know what to do.  Afterall, that's life!  Life doesn't hand you nicely structured problems with numbers laid out for you. Life is all about messy problems where you are knee-deep in navigating through random shitstorm of information. Communications with the parents have not been extremely fruitful either.  Problem solving and critical thinking is the key in answering open questions.  I am out of strategies of negotiating this huge discomfort with open ended questions.  Of course, not all questions I give the students are open-ended questions.  I do include questions that are closed in order for students to develop confidence (even though I am a bit iffy about developing confidence simply because my answer is the same as your answer)... but I just don't know.

I am probably not explaining this situation well enough, but this has been plaguing my mind for the last few weeks.  I am not about to change my philosophy towards using good questions in order to elicit thinking... but I need to build a better cushion for students that feel overwhelmed with this.  Or... perhaps put a few flowery ribbons on these open questions?

Lots to think about.