The Right Question Institute makes it possible for all people to learn to ask better questions and participate more effectively in key decisions.
Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions
The Question Formulation Technique, created by the Right Question Institute, is a simple yet powerful strategy to teach students how to formulate their own questions. Learn the Question Formulation Technique today, facilitate the strategy tomorrow, and watch students become more curious, engaged learners.
Questioning, Advocating, and Participating in Democracy
Learn how asking questions and partnering in the decision making process can fundamentally change how individuals participate in democracy.
[The QFT] helps you form ideas, new ideas, and like prepare yourself for what you’re about to learn or what you’re learning.
I believe all of us, including our students, should spend far more time thinking about the right questions to ask. Most of us spend too much time worrying about having a right answer in both our professional lives and personal lives. But the truth is, the answer can only be as good as the question asked.
Today I learned how to alter and improve my research question. This has already helped my research question become more manageable and fit within the requirement of the project better. This helped me zero in and pinpoint which section of my topic I am truly interested in.
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.’
A student who hadn’t said a word all summer led his group in identifying open and closed questions.
Hundreds of thousands of people across many fields are enthusiastically using RQI’s resources to help individuals develop their own ability to ask better questions and participate more effectively in decisions.
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Over 300,000 educators around the world have used the Question Formulation Technique, and the Right Question Institute and its strategies have appeared in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Education Week, and many other publications. See RQI in the Press
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Our materials are available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. To comply with this license, you must include the following language on all materials you use, share, adapt, or create: “Source: The Right Question Institute (RQI). The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) was created by RQI. Visit rightquestion.org for more information and free resources.”
As long as you include this source language, you are welcome to use, adapt, and share our strategies and materials for noncommercial use. You may also create new materials that reference the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) and/or other Right Question Institute strategies as long as you include the source language above. If you are interested in sharing RQI’s resources for commercial purposes you must contact us by selecting the “Permission for Use” option on the contact form.