RQP Blog

·                The Lasting Value of the Right Question Institute’s

·                Voter Engagement Strategy for Election Day and Beyond:

·                 A View from Philadelphia

·                We have a guest blogger on the Microdemocracy Blog. Nathalie Alegre immigrated from Peru with her family when she was 17 years old. After attending community college in Miami, she transferred to Yale University and in 2008 received a B.A. in Environmental Studies and is currently engaged in environmental organizing in New Haven, CT.

·                She’s been interviewing some of the great people around the country who have integrated the teaching of the RQI Strategy into their on-going work. Their stories are inspiring and they motivate us even more to make the RQI Strategy available to as many people as possible in these difficult times.

·                The first stories come from an interview with Earldine Tolbert, an adult educator in Philadelphia who learned to teach the RQI strategy last year. She provides great evidence of the value of using any opportunity – including a voter engagement initiative – to build skills to help people learn to how to help themselves, even when facing very difficult challenges. I had a chance to observe Earldine and her colleagues in Philadelphia and was struck both by the dedication and thoughtfulness they bring to the work, but also how they are so deeply trusted and appreciated by their adult learners who have not, previously, had very positive experiences in a teaching and learning environment.

·                A Powerful New Tool for a Dedicated Experienced Teacher

by Nathalie Alegre

·                Earldine Tolbert is an adult literacy instructor and Workforce Development (WELL) Program Specialist at Temple University’s Center for Social Policy and Community Development. Initially a volunteer tutor, Earldine was struck by the high numbers of low-literacy adults who lack a high school diploma in her native Philadelphia. After undergoing instructor training, Earldine started teaching and realized she had found her niche: “This type of work is more than just getting a pay check, you have to have a passion for doing it.”

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·                The WELL Program assists disadvantaged adults by providing education that helps them overcome illiteracy and prepares them to enter the workplace. To achieve this, Earldine and her colleagues make sure to integrate real-life, on-the-job connections to all aspects of their curriculum. For example, Earldine uses standard wrench sizing to illustrate how to reduce mathematical fractions and links following directions on a reading comprehension worksheet to following an employer’s directions.

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·                Students in Earldine’s classrooms come from widely diverse backgrounds and have varied reasons for seeking accreditation: there are people that due to life circumstances have to drop out of high school or older adults with decades of experience in the same job who want to move-up from their current positions, switch careers or retain employment. Whatever the case, “everybody comes into the classroom with some kind of expertise, some knowledge. These are people that have raised children, bought homes, secured jobs but that, for the most part, lack formal education.” Earldine describes it as a “Swiss Cheese” type of knowledge: people are clever in their own way of doing things, but there are many gaps and holes in their learning. Earldine strives to piggyback on her students’ existing knowledge by meeting them where they are, making them realize they already know a lot, and building from their strengths. However, she feels that the most important thing she does is teaching her students how to learn and how to use information to succeed at work and in life: “What I’m trying to do in a very short amount of time is to open my students’ heads up, show them how to pull information from different sources and have them interpret and apply that information to whatever they need to.”

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·                That’s why when Earldine went through an RQI workshop, she instantly realized the huge impact the question formulation strategy would have on her adult literacy students. The RQI Strategy provides a simple, easy to replicate framework for teaching people how to identify what they need to know and how to formulate a good question that gets them the answers they need. “I am a person who asks questions, but I never thought of a formal process for getting people into that asking-the-right-question mode. I came to [the RQI workshop] as another professional development session but I was so impressed about how simple it was and how it hit home.” Earldine easily adapted the RQI workshop and made it an essential part of her program’s Learning 2 Learn component. During Learning 2 Learn sessions, instructors and students together assess obstacles and challenges that may arise in the course of the class. They talk about time management, learning styles, and problem-solving such trouble as What happens when the babysitter doesn’t show up? or How do I deal with the city-wide transportation strike?

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·                Earldine and her students had a great time learning how to brainstorm questions with RQI’s Clothing Director exercise, one in which people pretend they have to elect the person that will be in charge of their personal wardrobe every morning. RQI designed the exercise to make visible that people who don’t see themselves as sophisticated thinkers, actually are able to use a very complex process, digest a lot of information and do an analysis based on facts and feelings to come to a decision.

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·                She described what happened when the students participated in the exercise: “People were very excited! Everybody thought about the decisions they had to make to get dressed that day. I was amazed at how different people could use this brainstorming technique and basically come up with the same things.” In fact, students not only got to practice the kind of highly sophisticated thinking that is required to come up with good questions, but they felt empowered in the realization that many of them were asking similar questions. Then, they made the connection to the idea that they should pay attention to decisions that elected officials make that affect them: “People don’t even realize they have the right to ask questions of people who make such big decisions about their daily life.”

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·                Earldine’s students thought hard about how to use the process effectively. One woman said she would use the RQI strategy with her child’s doctor. Her boy has asthma and the doctor wants to give him a new drug that the mother is not yet ready to okay. She wants to go back and ask more questions before they move forward with the treatment. Another student suggested he could use RQI to prepare for a job interview. He wants to figure out what kinds of questions he will be asked, and what to ask potential employers about his future working conditions. Other students suggested they use the RQI strategy to find out exactly why they need to learn the materials WELL instructors present to them. That is fine by Earldine: “I always tell my students they can’t just accept what people tell them, they have to always ask questions”. But to ask good questions is not a skill most people have. That’s why the RQI strategy complements Earldine’s teaching philosophy perfectly: the RQI technique teaches people how to focus on key decisions that affect them and gives people the ability to formulate their own questions about those decisions and about other concerns. And it works! One of Earldine’s students, Dominique, actually avoided an illegal eviction attempt by using the skills she learned at the RQI workshop. More about that at a later time…

Sheila teaches adult education at the county jail in Wilmington Indiana. Her courses are the only education inmates get while they’re in jail; she teaches them to read, prepares them for the GED, overall college readiness and life skills.
Sheila was trained to teach adult education using traditional methods, focusing on independent study, testing, drilling. After teaching for a few years, she realized, “That model didn’t work in public schools and it is not going to work now.” She was ready for something different, and The Right Question Project Educational Strategy (The RQP Strategy) seemed interesting and simple enough to try out.
The first time Sheila tried it she was overwhelmed by her results. “I love teaching it.  It was probably the highlight of my week when I did it.” Her students also had an immediate positive reaction and told Sheila “…they learned more in that one day than they’ve learned in weeks.” They explained that they were so excited they, “…wanted to do RQP every Friday!”

Student Changes: From Academic Skills to Civic Engagement
Sheila found multiple applications for the process; academic, personal and civic. In terms of GED (High School equivalency) preparation, she reflected, “ It helps them think things through and do more problem solving.  It (The GED) is about, ‘what do I know, what do I need, how do I get that information?’” 
As they learned the difference between open and close ended questions, students realized their attorneys ask lots of closed ended questions, “So we talked about …how much more information you can get with your open ended questions and how you get the answers you want by closing a question…”
Perhaps the biggest change Sheila noticed was a change in attitudes towards voting. Before trying out the Right Question Project Voter Engagement Strategy, Sheila noted, “…my jail students don’t care ... and don’t know why they should vote.” After this brief workshop, she found that, “everybody who was allowed to be registered did it…I probably got twenty people to vote that never voted in their lives… “ Her students told her, “I never thought voting was important but you really showed me how important it was...now I’m so excited to vote.”

Professional Development: A Tool for Educators of All Ages
Overall, Sheila was amazed by how much more inquisitive her students had become, “They seem more interested in learning and they ask much and better questions than they used to. They are having more discussions and are more interested in what’s happening in the world.” Because of her own success, she brought the RQP Strategy to a teachers meeting.  In only half an hour, she walked the other teachers through the process, and showed the questions her students had come up with. She explained that they were “wowed!”  Sheila believes the Strategy is an excellent tool, “…not only for adult education,… but for seniors and for civic government teachers to do in public school.  It will even be good to do with younger children so they learn … to ask the questions younger and don’t wait until they are adults to learn to ask the questions.”

Thanks to Natasha Freidus of Creative Narrations for interviewing Sheila and providing this report.

We could all use a magic wand just about right now.

Over the past few months, as we were working in Arizona, Indiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and several New England states in our Voter Engagement Strategy for Election Day and Beyond, we heard poignant and powerful stories from participants around the country. Even as they considered voting for the first time in their lives, they were also facing a series of immediate and very pressing questions.

Do they pay for their children's medication or food for the family? How do they pay for their child's school supplies or new shoes to fit growing feet? Can they find transportation to look for a job? Can they afford the transportation? Are there jobs to find? Are there jobs that will pay a living wage? How long will they be able to afford the rent? How can they delay paying bills they already have before going further into debt?

These questions just don't go away, even as the adult learners we met are trying to fill in gaps in their education. In the morning, they're working on fractions; in the evenings, they are back grappling with the hard questions. And, it's all taking place on a step below the level where the sub-prime mortgage/foreclosure disaster is happening.

None of us have a magic wand. None of us can snap our fingers and make these problems go away. And none of us can give enough money to any one cause to make these problems disappear. Apparently, even a spare 700 billion can't immediately turn the economy around.

Making the Right Investment
The deliberations about the national and international economic crisis swing back and forth between grasping for emergency fixes and planning for sustainable solutions. We face a similar challenge when thinking about the problems facing people whose basic needs are not being met, who have to choose between food and medication for their children. We must find ways to help right away. But, we also need to think about how do we invest in them for the long term, even right now when the short-term problems are so severe.

Reasons for Hope
The people we met this fall give us hope for what can be done. They are not shrinking from the problems at hand, problems that are, truth be told, quite daunting. They are seizing the opportunity offered by one specific kind of public investment; by participating in adult literacy, English as a Second Language and adult education classes. Their fiercely dedicated teachers - who invest day in and day out in their students - greatly appreciated the opportunity to teach our strategy to their students. One teacher told us "you could see the light bulb turning on" when the students learned RQP's thinking and advocacy skills. Elden, a young man in Evansville, Indiana captured what he learned from the Right Question Project workshop and offered some direction for our future work when he said: They should be teaching this already in school. Long before kids drop out, because you can use this everywhere to help yourself.

As many of us sit around the Thanksgiving table, with our own concerns and challenges in mind, and as we are keenly aware of people who have fewer resources and more troubles, let's carve out space to keep Elden in mind. There are a lot of people like him, all over the country, who are ready to take advantage of existing opportunities and create new ones. We want to keep investing in them, to be of help immediately and make it easier for them to help themselves in the long run.

For the past month, the nation has sharply focused on a decision about who will lead the country for the next four years.

In that same time, in our voter engagement initiative, we’ve been working with people who, every week, come face to face with decisions in the public sector that have enormous consequences for them.  Our job has been to figure out how make it easier for them to make their own connections between decisions they see in front of them, and the decisions that elected officials make.

We recently did a workshop with a group of women in a support group not far from our office who have faced crises such as homelessness and domestic violence.  They have many pressing, immediate needs and concerns; an upcoming date in court, a meeting at the housing authority, an appointment at the community health center, and a meeting with a child’s teacher.  A lot of challenges and not much patience. One of the women was irritated by our workshop. What could a workshop connected to the election possibly offer them?

But as the workshop went on, she started learning new skills for asking her own questions. She began to look at a range of decisions that affect her, and realized that there’s a whole lot of questions that she needs to be asking: This can really help me with all the housing problems I got.

Another participant, when reflecting on what she had learned, asserted clearly that she didn’t want others to always make decisions for me.

By the end, she and other women in the group had very strong feelings that they need to have a say in decisions that affect them on a “micro” level where they try to secure housing, health care or education for their kids. More than that, they also named new connections they now see, especially about the need to have a say in the election as well, a big decision that affects them in so many ways.