Nov 19, 2019
Captured during Fall Semester, Inspired Teaching Day, the DEST team brought in some amazing facilitators to take us through the process of The Question Formulation Technique.
Luz Santana, the co-director of Right Question Institute and Andrew Minigan director of strategy for the Education Program of The Question Formulation Technique all the way from Boston. They introduce us to the process and emphasize why there is such an importance to asking questions, especially good ones. You can even follow along with the exercises at home!
The Harvard Education publishing group says….
[The] Right Question Institute have developed [a technique] called the Question Formulation Technique (QFT). This technique helps students learn how to produce their own questions, improve them, and strategize on how to use them. In the classroom, teachers have seen how the same process manages to develop students’ divergent (brainstorming), convergent (categorizing and prioritizing), and metacognitive (reflective) thinking abilities in a very short period of time.
Typically, questions are seen as the province of teachers, who spend years figuring out how to craft questions and fine-tune them to stimulate students’ curiosity or engage them more effectively. We have found that teaching students to ask their own questions can accomplish these same goals while teaching a critical lifelong skill.
The Right Question Institute (RQI) [rightquestion.org] began its work with a dropout prevention program in Lawrence, Massachusetts, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, when parents told [them] they were not participating in their children’s education because they “don’t even know what to ask.”…Parents had identified an obstacle that prevents many people from learning, from thinking for themselves, from doing their own problem solving, and from becoming more self-sufficient.
**For more information visit Right Question Institute
Run Time: 22 min, 51 sec
To find the full transcript for this episode, click HERE