Release the expectation that questions must be followed by answers, and instead position questioning as a key part of the learning journey itself.
On a recent episode of our Teaching Today podcast, Dr. Roberta Lenger Kang and Dr. Cristina Compton are in conversation with Dan Rothstein, Luz Santana, and Sarah Westbrook from The Right Question Institute, an organization founded on the belief that when people of all ages learn to ask the right questions, it leads to feeling a new sense of agency, confidence, and power. In particular, they talk about the power of the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a structured method for generating and improving questions.
In its simplest terms, facilitating the QFT means walking participants through the process of producing questions, improving questions, strategizing around their questions, and reflecting on what they learned. To start, participants are given four rules for producing questions around a selected focus:
Then, participants work to improve questions by identifying questions as open-ended or closed, reflecting on the advantages of each type, and experimenting with changing open-ended questions to close-ended questions, and vice versa. Strategizing around questions means participants identify the questions they find most important, and consider what they would need to know and do in order to work towards answers. Finally, participants reflect on what they learn throughout the process. Recently, I utilized the QFT in a whole school PD at one of our partner schools in the Bronx. In a recent round of classroom visits, the school leadership team had noticed a trend: more often than not, lessons lacked closure. Students would be in the middle of a learning activity when the bell would ring and they would need to pack up and move to their next class. I wanted to use the QFT as a way to launch this new PD topic. It was really interesting to listen to the episode in light of this experience. Here, I share five big ideas from the episode and reflect on their connection to my recent facilitation of the QFT, in hopes of bringing them to life with examples from the field. “While we worked with families, very often they said that they were not going to the children’s school and they were not participating because they didn’t even know what questions to ask. So they gave us an idea that asking questions was a big need.”
At the beginning of the podcast, Luz shares with us the origin story of the QFT — how her and Dan’s work with families connected to a dropout prevention program in a low income community north of Boston inspired them to work on development of the skill of question formulation.
Since so much of the mission of The Right Question Institute seems to be about empowering students in asking their own questions, I share the surprise that Cristina expresses about the fact that the strategy was actually born from work with adults. But upon further reflection, it makes sense. In Malcom Knowles’ six assumptions of adult learners, he stresses the importance of intrinsic motivation, or the idea that “adults learn best when motivated from within, not from incentives or other external influences.” Letting teachers drive the inquiry and steer the direction of the learning is crucial to intrinsic motivation, and the QFT is one possible and powerful lever for doing so. Relating back to my own experience, this point felt particularly salient for a topic like lesson closure — which, I think most would agree, is pretty dry on the surface. It felt especially important to consider how to engage teachers in a way that felt authentic, beyond basic compliance. “ [An] indicator you’re doing it right is that there’s divergent thinking that’s happening, there’s convergent thinking that’s happening, and there’s metacognitive thinking. And those are the three core thinking abilities we feel are sort of part and parcel of what the QFT is and does.”
I’ll admit that when Cristina asks the panel a question about fidelity and what it looks like in relation to the QFT, I got a little nervous. In my PD session, I did not follow the QFT “to fidelity” in the sense of strictly adhering to the four steps that they outline. Rather, I took it upon myself to make some tweaks based on my content, audience, and purpose. For example, I didn’t have teachers change questions from closed to open, or open to closed; I thought our limited time would be better spent trying to categorize the questions into themes.
So, I was heartened to hear how Sarah and the team were defining fidelity partly as the presence of those three types of thinking: divergent thinking, or “that really creative, generative thinking that happens when you first produce questions,” convergent thinking, which happens when “you’re working on the form of your question or when you’re prioritizing,” and metacognition, or “thinking about your thinking, which happens all the way through.” According to this definition, I think my adaptation of the protocol could still be considered faithful to the spirit and purpose of the QFT. This definition should also empower other teachers and facilitators to make the protocol work for them. “It’s fascinating to think about students’ questions as a formative assessment…it’s just an extraordinary resource to hear what they are asking about without you telling them what you should be thinking about.”
Dan’s point that the QFT can serve multiple purposes — formative assessment being one of them — really resonated with my facilitation experience as well. When the school’s principal shared that this was an area of growth for teachers, I trusted her assessment, but knew I didn’t have the full picture. I immediately began posing questions of my own: what was preventing teachers from closing their lessons? Was it a lack of conviction in the importance, a lack of concrete strategies, or something else I couldn’t have anticipated? The themes that emerged from their questions (many around the challenges of pacing) helped to steer the direction of the inquiry cycle to directly respond to their interests and needs.
“You could go through the whole QFT and never answer a single question that’s posed. Rather, it’s about curiosity. It’s about looking at something from multiple perspectives.”
In summarizing some of the conversation, Roberta reflects on how the QFT “flips the script” on traditional learning in a few crucial ways, not only in terms of who is asking the questions, but also in terms of the purpose behind asking them — not to “fill in the blank” but as a way to embark on a learning “expedition.”
When I returned to the Bronx the week following the QFT to continue the learning series, the school’s principal was excited to share that she already was noticing a positive shift in teachers’ practice around lesson closure. On a surface level, this was pretty surprising; after all, we hadn’t actually answered most of the questions yet, or discussed any concrete best practices. But in light of the podcast discussion, it makes sense: The questions themselves become the learning, or at least a large part of it. “One of Luz’s pieces of advice that I also keep in mind is that you have to put on your thick skin. Sometimes it doesn’t work perfectly the first time.”
Here, Sarah reminds us that when trying the QFT for the first time, or in a new context, we have to tolerate the messiness of learning, recognizing that both facilitation and participation with any new protocol or strategies requires some trial and error, as well as multiple opportunities for mastery.
I want to highlight this point, so as not to misrepresent my facilitation experience; while it was mostly positive, there were also some challenges. Teacher feedback suggests many, if not most, of the teachers found the PD session engaging and understood its purpose. Still, one teacher shared their frustration that the session was “focused on the problem” and not the solution. To me, this feedback highlights Roberta’s point that this way of engaging with a topic is a paradigm shift; when we enter a space as a learner, we expect to be given answers. But it also highlights for me the need as a facilitator to be even more explicit about the fact that protocol represents the beginning of a learning journey and not its entirety. Furthermore, as Luz suggests, I returned to the teacher-generated questions in subsequent sessions to make their connection to our work clear. |
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