Welcome to The Right Question Institute

The Right Question Institute (RQI)* promotes the use of a simple, powerful, evidence-based strategy that helps all people, no matter their level of income, literacy or education, learn to help themselves.

Our new book on the use of the Right Question Strategy in the classroom was published on September 20, 2011:

You can purchase the book from our publisher, Harvard Education Press here: Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions

Make Just One Change presents an argument and a methodology for how teachers can integrate the teaching of the skill of question formulation into their regular classroom practice. The simple shift in practice, from teachers asking questions of students to students learning to generate and improve their own questions, leads to significant cognitive, affective and behavioral changes in students.

Make Just One Change by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana

   “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.’”  

  - Howard Gardner, The John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

 

quotes from students using the question formulation technique

"[The authors] provide...an inspiring vision of education at its best and an extraordinarily clear, low-tech, practical intellectual tool for turning that vision into reality."

   - from the foreword by Wendy D. Puriefoy, president, Public Education Network

 

 

Also, see our article, Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions, in the Harvard Education Letter, here: http://www.hepg.org/hel/article/507

 

* Formerly the Right Question Project, Inc. (RQP)