QUESTIONS


Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana (2011). 

    Make Just One Change: 

    Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions.


Rothstein has a doctorate in education and Santana an MA in Human Services, both are educators.

The book is based on 20 years of piloting, testing, and refining the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), which was inspired by a parent comment in a PTA meeting: "We don't know what to ASK, or, we don't know how to ask questions.


The steps for the QFT are deceptively simple, and the rules must be followed for the technique to empower, motivate, and allow students to develop their divergent (generate a diverse set of questions), convergent (assess and focus on a few questions), and metacognitive (explore reasons for their choices) thinking muscles:

1. Produce Questions based on teacher stimulus...this could be a word, phrase, picture, recording, etc. (the stimulus should be: simple, clear, provocative) using the following rules:

ask as many questions as possible

do not stop to discuss, judge or answer any questions (that comes later)

record every question EXACTLY as stated (have a scribe quote it)

change any statements into questions

2. Improve the Questions by categorizing them as closed (marked with a C) or open (marked with an O) questions, and explain WHY (closed questions have a limited response, e.g., how old are you? whereas open questions have many possible responses, e.g., what type of person are you?).

list pros and cons associated with open and closed questions

turn one open question into a closed one, and one closed question into an open one

3. Prioritize the Questions by choosing the top 3 and explain why for each choice

4.Teacher decides how students will use the questions, e.g., as topics for a paper, project, presentation, or to prepare for discussion, reading, exam...


QFT works best in groups, with the teacher guiding and monitoring the process to ensure students stay on task. Only a few minutes are needed for each part (more time is needed in the beginning until students are comfortable with the process). Especially important is that the teacher does not give examples of questions and does not reinforce some questions as better than others.

The primary goals of QFT are to have students develop their own questions, take ownership of their learning, explore topics that they want to learn about via questions, and find ways to answer their own questions...this has tremendous external validity for other courses and for other decisions/problems in everyday life.


The application is to try out the QFT with a group you are part of (e.g., class, workshop, therapy, friends, family, club, circle...). Additional resources can be found at the Right Questions Institute: https://rightquestion.org/



 

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