Join the Right Question Network
Our strategies and resources are the outcomes of decades of work. We continue to learn with practitioners across many fields to develop and simplify two robust processes,
- The Question Formulation Technique, which helps all individuals learn how to formulate, work with, and use their own questions. Through learning how to ask their own questions everyone, students, parents, clients, and patients alike, can become more engaged, critical thinkers.
- The Framework for Accountable Decision Making, which helps individuals, learn for themselves how to effectively participate in decisions that affect them. Through learning how to effectively participate in decision, the decision-making process becomes more democratic and all individuals are equipped with skills to advocate for themselves.
Join the Right Question Network Today
The free resources you will find on our network will help you easily move into action to learn a strategy one day and facilitate the very next.
As a member of our website, you can:
- Access free downloadable resources to learn the Question Formulation Technique to teach others how to formulate their own questions
- Access free downloadable resources to learn the Framework for Accountable Decision Making to teach others how to more effectively participate in the decision-making process
- Watch videos to learn how to effectively implement these strategies and learn from practitioners across different fields
- Peruse blogs and dig into the nuance of facilitation and continue to learn how to best adapt implementation for different purposes
- Learn about recent news and upcoming events
- Receive regular newsletters including information on new resources, blogs, articles, and learning opportunities
I believe all of us, including our students, should spend far more time thinking about the right questions to ask. Most of us spend too much time worrying about having a right answer in both our professional lives and personal lives. But the truth is, the answer can only be as good as the question asked.
Recognizing that the genius of democracy is in its roots, [RQI] sets about strengthening those roots. By helping people learn how to help themselves the project makes possible the vital process of converting residents into effective citizens… The project offers the possibility of strengthening the vital core of our society.
As the title of this book indicates, Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana believe that education can be transformed if students, rather than teachers, assume responsibility for posing questions. This idea may sound simple, but it is both complex and radical: complex, in that formulating good, generative questions, and being prepared to work toward satisfactory answers, is hardly a simple undertaking; and radical, in the sense that an apparently easy move can bring about a Copernican revolution in the atmosphere of the classroom and the dynamics of learning. The authors modestly quote physicist Niels Bohr who once said, ‘An expert is someone who has made all possible mistakes in a field and there are no more to be made.’ In reading this powerful work, I was reminded of what Albert Einstein said, when he learned of Jean Piaget’s pioneering questioning of young children: ‘so simple only a genius could have thought of it.’
…it wouldn’t be hard to supercharge the Question Formulation Technique with big questions. Teachers could choose Question Foci with big understandings in mind. Learners could include criteria related to insight, action, ethics, and opportunity as they sort their questions for importance. The main point is this: putting learners in charge of questions.
When you ask a question, it can spark more questions.