The Necessity of Asking Questions

With Dan, we discussed the importance of formulating questions, the challenges with teachers trying to incorporate a question-asking strategy into their classrooms, and the lifelong need for citizens in a democracy to know how to ask the “right questions.”
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PIL: How does the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) that you and Luz developed work? Can you provide an example of your technique in a classroom? What outcomes can teachers and school administrators expect from students who learn to deliberately ask their own questions?

Dan: Many people describe the QFT as deceptively simple. It’s a compliment actually to say the QFT accomplishes more than one might expect from just looking at its distinct components. And, we’re content to stick to “simple,” since it better expresses the experience of educators learning the QFT one day and implementing it the next.

There are many free resources for learning the QFT and the process is described in depth in our book. But I’d summarize it this way: Initially, the teacher considers the content and any specific teaching and learning goals, e.g., acquisition of knowledge, engagement with materials, research projects, laboratory experiments, or problem solving. Based on this, the educator designs a “Question Focus,” which is a term we created, not to add more jargon in the world, but to underscore the shift from asking questions of students to providing a focus for students to ask their own questions. Hence, educators need to “make just one change,” as we say.

Once the teaching goals are set and a Question Focus is developed, the process unfolds in a very straightforward fashion:

• Students review the four rules for producing questions and identify what might be difficult about following them.
• Students produce questions, following the rules.
• Students look at advantages and disadvantages of closed- and open-ended questions and practice changing some of their closed-ended to open-ended and vice versa.
• The educator provides prioritization instructions that could be as simple as “choose the three questions you consider most important.”
• Students prioritize the questions.
• Students work on next steps; how they will be using the questions.
• The educator provides reflection questions and the students think about and discuss what they learned and how they learned it.

And that’s it. The technique is used across various contexts, including elementary schools, secondary schools, special education classrooms, libraries, and professional development, as well as for a scope of purposes, including engagement, inducing curiosity, comprehension, and critical thinking (among others).

A fascinating example on the college level that has not yet been fully written up is the outstanding work of Dan Perlman, Brandeis University Professor of Biology and Associate Provost of Innovation in Education. In his course, “Evolutionary Ecology,” he begins the semester with his students going through the QFT process for the first time ever.

The source of his Question Focus is surprisingly obvious and it’s actually the title of the textbook they use: “The Distribution and Abundance of Organisms.” According to Professor Perlman, the result is they then have a remarkable array of questions serving as a learning agenda for them to discover the answers, week by week, chapter by chapter. They have activated their minds, sparked their own curiosity, and articulated what they want and need to know.

He uses the QFT as a learning practice throughout the semester and by the end of the term, what is his Question Focus? It’s the title of the textbook; the exact same Question Focus with which he began the semester. The students go through the QFT process and are able to see that “completing a course,” “finishing a text book,” is not the end of learning, but rather a stepping stone to a new set of questions, informed by all they had learned.

For the professor, their questions can also serve as a kind of summative assessment, of how much students have grasped, the sophistication of their questions, and their identification of the new frontiers of knowledge they want to explore. It is an inspiring and exciting moment in their learning journey.

The process is unusual in that students develop three distinct thinking abilities. They learn to think divergently as they produce their questions, convergently as they work on closed- and open-ended questions and prioritize their questions, and metacognitively as they reflect on what they learned and how they learned it. Educators report that as students develop these three thinking abilities, there are clear cognitive, affective, and behavioral changes that emerge. Students are more excited about learning and they feel more confidence in themselves as students. They also feel a new sense of ownership in their learning process. And, there are changes in the way they act; they self-regulate more effectively, listen to each other, and learn from each other.

When asked how they might use the QFT beyond the classroom, many talked about its application to life, learning in general, and their work and careers ahead. One student reflected: “Developing our own questions pushes us to dig deeper into the concepts we cover, and encourages us to avoid making assumptions about seemingly basic or evident concepts.”

PIL: In a 2014 guest column on education, you wrote: “Schools of education train teachers to ask questions of their students, but rarely prepare them to teach students how to ask their own.” Why is this the case? What is the social cost of not training teachers how to nurture their own students’ curiosity and ability to ask questions? How can we change this paradigm? 

Dan: Why is this the case, indeed! The importance of asking questions already has been strongly articulated. Stuart Firestein, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, argues in his short book, Ignorance: How it Drives Science, that the solution is “teaching students how to think in questions, to manage ignorance.”

Warren Berger, in his recent book, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Innovation, provides excellent examples of how question asking is a transformational skill. Tony Wagner has been on a campaign in several of his books to advance the teaching of key skills for learning, and question formulation holds a prominent place on the list.

Cathy Davidson, Director of the Futures Initiative at CUNY’s Graduate Center and previous Smart Talk subject, also writes about the importance of finding creative ways to promote inquiry-based problem-solving in her book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. The Common Core State Standards, the Next Generation Science Standards, the Library of Congress’ Teaching with Primary Sources program, the C3 Social Studies Framework, and Project-Based Learning efforts also emphasize the need to promote inquiry in teaching and learning practices in K-12 classrooms.

Clearly, the universe of advocates for inquiry-based education is expanding. We are not alone in making this argument about the importance of questions. Our very specific role in this movement is to focus sharply on figuring out how to make the deliberate teaching of the skill as easy as possible. If we have one argument to add, it is to support the discovery by so many teachers who report how they are “surprised and amazed by the depth of students’ questions when they are given the chance to work on their own questions.” Which brings us back to the question of why schools of education have not yet made question formulation skills a top priority? We have come to learn of three primary reasons:

(1) Schools of education focus primarily on developing the ability of teachers to ask better questions of students.
This comes out of a concern that too many teachers are asking a litany of uninteresting, lower-order-thinking questions, focused more on recall or simple answers, but fail to provoke thinking. Many schools of education offer valuable guidance on how teachers can improve their questioning of students.

While we agree that it is certainly important for teachers to learn how to ask better questions of their students, there is a danger embedded in focusing solely on that. The emphasis on teachers asking the questions, no matter how thought provoking they may be, can unintentionally communicate a message to students that their primary thinking role is to respond to their teacher’s questions. Students need to learn to ask their own questions without direct guidance from their teachers. That brings us to a second obstacle to students learning the skill themselves.

(2) The widespread belief that students will learn how to ask better questions only if the teacher first models the kinds of questions they should be asking. This practice, strongly established in traditional teacher education, does lead to some students picking up the nuances of good questions from their teachers. But, “modeling” has its limits and some students learning how to ask questions is not the same as all or almost all students. How many students learn how to think for themselves when they are concentrating on following a model others have created for them? How much do they understand about how to manipulate and work with questions in order to improve them?

There is certainly a place for teacher modeling as a pedagogical strategy, but, as one teacher asked in a seminar we did with the Los Angeles Unified School District: “When is it most effective to model and when does it undermine students’ independent thinking?” Many teachers have told us they’ve become aware that by emphasizing students adopting their model of questioning, too many students try to follow the teacher’s example and thus miss out on the beginning step of thinking divergently with their own questions.

(3) There has not been a simple way (emphasis on “simple”) to help teachers develop the skill of question formulation in their students.

In the student-centered practice of Project Based Learning (PBL), students are encouraged to create a driving question. Sara Armstrong, a long-time PBL coach, shared with us that often, “teachers have to work so hard to pull that driving question out of the student that the line blurs about whose question, ultimately, it is: the student’s or a version of a teacher-guided question?” The step of creating a driving question, she argues, is absolutely the most difficult step for students.

Such challenges, in an environment that is already student-centered, serve as a caution for us. If we argue that “modeling of questions” should not be the primary way for students to learn to ask their own questions, then, we have a responsibility to offer something in its place. It took us nearly a decade to distill a range of best practices into the simple steps of the QFT. When we finally hammered it out, after much trial and error, we fully understood that simple should never be confused with simplistic. Now, with implementation all over the country and beyond, from primary grades to medical school, from public schools to public and private universities, the QFT apparently addresses a previously unmet need for a method that can quickly and effectively teach sophisticated question formulation skills to all students.

We are seeing this transformation in the current model thanks to the passion of teachers, professors, and librarians. That’s not the opening of a Gilbert & Sullivan ditty, but simply the naming of the key players in an emerging movement to teach the skill of question formulation to all students. As the QFT has found its way into nooks and crannies all around the country, we have learned just how quickly the meme and the practice of question formulation can find an audience. More and more teachers are active on our Twitter account @RightQuestion, and, when they come across descriptions of the QFT in various blog posts–including Mind/Shift and Edutopia–they move into action as a dissemination posse. They’ve shown how quickly a new practice can be embraced and implemented by teachers voluntarily. There are now more than 100,000 teachers using the QFT, when only a handful of classrooms were utilizing the technique just a few years ago.

One veteran high school teacher in Vermont (34 years in the classroom!) recently read our book and wrote on our forum: “[I] found it fascinating and at the same time perplexing. Why have I not been teaching using the QFT before? I was so inspired by this methodology that I immediately used it with 3 classes. The results were compelling!”

I am happy to say, that in the year since I wrote the piece mentioned, we have learned of more and more schools of education, in public and private institutions of higher education, making the QFT a key element of their efforts to help teachers create student-centered classrooms. In each teacher education program, there will be early adopters and then, soon, it will become common practice. If not now, then in the very near future, for who would want to make the case for NOT teaching students the skill of question formulation?

PIL: In your book, you write: “Most students do not arrive in the classroom equipped with metacognitive skills, nor do they leave with them at the end of their high school years” (pg. 18). You go on to write that this problem persists for many through college. Why are metacognitive skills so important to student success? What is one small thing professors, as well as academic librarians, can do to help college students develop their own metacognitive skills? 
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Dan: Consider how this question is framed: “Why are metacognitive skills so important to student success?” This question reflects an important ability to think about thinking, that is, to use metacognition. Now, what would be the implications of not knowing how to think about your thinking?

You might receive information, be directed where to get information, and prepare to return that information as an answer to someone else’s question. How would that leave you better prepared to name what you need to be thinking about in order to solve a problem? Now, it certainly is possible to excel as a student without using metacognition. I recently delivered a keynote to Harvard Medical School’s annual Symposium on the Science of Learning. I was invited by a thoughtful group of physician educators at the medical school who are working diligently to find ways to help their students–who have indeed excelled for years at answering other people’s questions–develop metacognitive skills to help them learn to think for themselves, engage more in problem-solving, and develop the questioning skills they will need long past the time they are taking tests.

There is a recognition that as students become doctors, they need to be able to think about information and knowledge in a reflective way. They need to analyze what they see before them, question any assumptions, and understand how and why they reach their conclusions or diagnoses.

Dr. Jerome Groopman writes about this in his masterful work, How Doctors Think, where he highlights a doctor who checks his own thinking, tries to avoid what Groopman calls “cognitive cherry-picking,” and asks himself “what else could this be?” It appears to be a simple question, but if not asked, it dramatically limits the scope of thinking and possibilities. Metacognition, thinking about your thinking, being aware of how you are coming to certain ideas, and reaching specific conclusions, offers both a check on common cognitive mistakes and a window to deeper understanding.

Recently, there’s been an enthusiasm for “clickers in the classroom,” in which students answer a few questions and the professor gets a quick read on student comprehension of the information just “covered.” Clickers have the added benefit, beyond improving comprehension, of keeping students’ attention on the class and away from Twitter, Snapchat, and the seductive vastness of the Web. In conjunction with or in place of clicker technology, there are also very simple, low-tech ways to keep students engaged and learning. Request from students, for example, at a relevant moment, to think about these questions:

• What did you just learn?
• What do you understand differently now about the content just delivered?

They can work on it on their own or share it with someone else, thus sparking some dialogue and active engagement. And they can be held accountable by having to record their thoughts on a GoogleDoc/spreadsheet. Metacognitive exercises may be perceived, at first, as a detour from “giving answers” via a clicker, but will actually provde a short-cut to deeper learning in ways that repeating information does not.

PIL: In PIL’s 2013 research study, we interviewed 35 first-term college students from six U.S. colleges and institutions about their information transition from high school to college. We identified and coded five recurring myths that interviewees had about libraries, college-level research, and assignments (pg. 19). More than anything else, first-term students seemed to think college-level research assignments required them to work independently and to not ask anyone for help with their work. What do you think keeps so many incoming college students from asking questions about what is expected from college-level work?

Dan: Somehow, somewhere along the educational journey, we have come to the idea that if a student does not know something, she or he simply will ask a question and–already knowing how to ask an effective question–will ask for help in using resources. But why should we expect that? Too often, as students make their way through their schooling, they are instructed on what to do, how to do it, what information to use, which resources to use, and then they are expected to get the assignment done. Have they learned skills to tackle the next assignment without direct guidance? How often do they get to set a learning agenda?

In Berger’s book, A More Beautiful Question, he quotes Steve Quatrano, a software engineer and entrepreneur, as saying that being able to ask questions–and according to Steve, using the QFT–is a “way to organize your thinking around what you don’t know.” Students have not been told that it is OK not to know. Firestein makes that case over and over again in Ignorance: How it Drives Science. The QFT actually “honors” ignorance; it is a step-by-step process that encourages you to articulate what you don’t know or what you want to know in the form of a question. You are not responding, giving an answer to someone else’s question. You are creating your own question, your own learning agenda, your own pathway to “organizing your thinking around what you don’t know.” That is powerful.

Imagine students viewing libraries not as “repositories” of other people’s knowledge, but as a beginning point for “organizing their thinking around what they don’t know.” Imagine students in courses that encourage dialogue, the exchange of ideas, and, yes, metacognition.

The act of engaging with others, of seeking different perspectives, of tapping other resources can become part of their modus operandi. If we want to encourage this, we can’t expect that it will happen by chance or osmosis. Thousands of students sitting alongside of each other, taking notes, and answering questions, is not the same as students engaged in thinking with their peers. There is a need for a pedagogical vision that deliberately builds a community engaged in intellectual exchange.

This is relevant as well to an emerging understanding of the librarian not as a source for information, but rather as a coach for learning how to access information. One librarian, Mary Johnson, who consults with the Library of Congress’ Teaching with Primary Sources program, has talked with us about the need for students to learn how to set their own learning agenda as they encounter primary sources. The same skill applies to asking for information about any sources found online or in a library. We have seen librarians taking on leadership roles in bringing the QFT to their schools and institutions. They, more than most people, understand the importance of developing skills to find information you do not already know. It is fundamental to their work and so many are committed to democratizing access to the skills needed for finding, assessing, and using information.

PIL: In a National Public Radio interview, you discussed the importance of asking questions as a lifelong learning skill that promotes a healthy democracy. In your own work, how has the ability to ask the “right questions” created a sense of agency in the workplace, communities, or beyond? How do you define what you call “the idea of Microdemocracy“?

Dan: Our work is grounded in lessons learned that are not in an academic institution or a think tank. The original insight about the importance of asking questions came from parents in a low-income community where Luz and I and other founders of the Right Question Institute were working. The parents said they did not participate in their children’s education, and did not go to the schools because they “didn’t even know what to ask.”

They named a profound problem that had not previously been fully acknowledged. We continued to learn from them that the skill of asking questions was not only a learning skill, it was also a transformational advocacy skill that led to much greater levels of self-efficacy. Eventually, as we observed them using their skills in many encounters with a range of public institutions and agencies, we learned another lesson about democratic participation. All people, even those who may have never participated in the democratic process, can learn key advocacy skills that are also democratic skills.

We learned from people as they took the skills learned for advocating at their children’s schools and applied them to advocating for themselves at the welfare office, for partnering more effectively with their health care providers and for participating, often for the first time, in traditional forms of democratic action, including organizing and voting. We gave a name to their participation in decisions during ordinary encounters with public agencies. We call that action on a micro level…Microdemocracy.

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Dan is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard College and has worked as a community educator, organizer, and urban planner in Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Israel.

In 1990, he founded the Right Question Institute with colleagues, one of whom is his co-director, Luz Santana, a former welfare recipient and factory worker who returned to school to earn an Associate’s Degree, a B.A., and a Master’s in Human Services. The Institute’s mission is to teach everyone, regardless of education, literacy, or income, how to ask their own right questions, so they can participate effectively in decisions that affect them in many arenas, including education, health care, and in the democratic process.

Smart Talks are informal conversations with leading thinkers about the challenges of education and lifelong learning in the digital age. The interviews are an occasional series produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL).

PIL is an ongoing and national research study about how students find and use information for courses and for use in their everyday lives and as lifelong learners. This interview with Dan Rothstein was made possible with the generous support of a research grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS), creating strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. Smart Talk interviews are open access and licensed by Creative Commons.

“Dan Rothstein: The Necessity of Asking Questions” (email interview), by Alison Head, Project Information Literacy, Smart Talk Interview, no. 24 (21 April 2015), is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.