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
All of these candidates — from the president to the county attorney — will be making decisions that could have a major impact on our lives. Students understand this at a surface level, but the ‘Why Vote?’ Tool helped make this knowledge real and personal.
I do think that the QFT process did open up students to be inquisitive, reflective thinkers, and these characteristics permeated into how students approached learning in any content area or aspect of school.
Now, when I go to meetings where people are making decisions that really affect my family, I don’t have to just sit there, not knowing what to say. I think about what I want to know and what I need to know and then I ask the question. What a difference!
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.’
I see that if I don’t vote, then other people are going to keep making decisions for me. This, at least, gives me a chance to have a say in who’s going to be making those decisions.