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
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.’
In the world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers. Unfortunately, our schools often have the opposite emphasis. They teach us how to answer, but not how to ask. The folks at the Right Question Institute are trying to correct that imbalance. They’ve come up with a method that educators can use to help students learn to ask better questions—and that can assist even those of us who graduated back in the twentieth century.
[The Right Question Strategy] allows people who don’t usually speak up to find their own voice. They don’t have to depend on me or others to speak for them… they speak for themselves.
…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.
[The QFT] makes me feel like I’m in control of my learning.