Curiosity Check and the Ask Approach

The Ask Approach is a framework from author Jeff Wetzler built on a simple premise: the insights we need most often already exist in the people around us, we just need to ask well. The five-step approach (curiosity, safety, quality questions, listening, reflection) offers practical tools for surfacing honest feedback and building trust, skills directly transferable to relational practice, staff culture, and leadership in schools and in the classroom.

Author/ source: Ask Approach by Jeff Weltzer

Last updated: 13/08/2026

Curiosity Check and the Ask Approach

For educators and school leaders, The Ask Approach offers a practical way to strengthen the relational culture at the heart of whole-school wellbeing. Its five-step framework builds the exact skills that underpin wellbeing education in practice:  creating psychological safety for staff and students to speak honestly, asking quality questions that uncover what's really going on beneath the surface, and truly listening before responding.

Whether you're leading a staff team, supporting colleagues through change, or building trust with students, this approach gives you a clear, repeatable method for surfacing the feedback, ideas, and concerns that so often go unsaid  and turning them into stronger collaboration, more responsive leadership, and a genuinely safer school culture.

The website

The site is built around Jeff Wetzler's book Ask:  a leadership framework centred on the idea that the answers leaders need are often already sitting with the people around them, but rarely get voiced. The Ask Approach helps surface hidden insights so leaders can make smarter decisions, avoid costly mistakes, and unlock everyone's highest potential. 

The core framework

The Ask Approach is a science-backed, practice-tested method with five steps: choosing curiosity to be genuinely interested in others; making it safe for people to tell the truth; posing quality questions; listening to learn; and reflecting and reconnecting to turn what's heard into insight and action. 

What's on offer

Beyond the book itself, the site promotes several ways organisations can engage with the framework: speaking engagements, an AI-powered 360 tool called AskAround that surfaces unspoken feedback, interactive Learning Labs, executive coaching, discussion/facilitation support, and custom partnership programmes to embed the approach into an organisation's culture.  Free downloadable tools:

  • The Curiosity Check: A free tool to check and increase your curiosity before an important conversation, as featured in Harvard Business Review.

  • Ask Discussion Guide:  A set of questions to guide a discussion of the book with a friend group, book club, or team.

  • Ask Frameworks:  Downloadable graphics of the book's key concepts, designed to display in an office or on a fridge.

  • Ask Key Templates: Templates to capture and reflect on important interactions, as described in the book.