In the Press

Stanford Social Innovation Review mentions the Right Question Institute and other organizations that are elevating the role of questions and curiosity in public discourse and decision-making.

RQI's Dan Rothsten, Luz Santana, and Sarah Westbrook joined the Teaching Today podcast at Teachers College, Columbia University, to discuss the importance of building student's ability to ask questions, the origins of the QFT, and the beautiful messiness of learning.

Naomi Campbell, director of the Legal Empowerment Program at the Right Question Institute, talks with Choose to be Curious host Lynn Borton. They discuss how questions and curiosity play a role in strengthening people's sense of agency and power.

"The ability to ask questions is one of the most important lifelong learning skills a student can acquire in the course of their education," writes Julia Brodsky, a STEM educator and former NASA astronaut instructor. However, "The importance of questioning as a practice extends far beyond the classroom," she says. "From science to management to democracy, there is no replacement for questioning."

Now, the Right Question Institute is going back to its roots, leading workshops with parents and districts around using the QFT to learn about three important parts of parenting in the American education system: supporting, monitoring and advocating for one's child in school. Additionally, they’re helping parents to look beyond simple answers in order to question how decisions get made at the school and district level.

On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus’s “The Plague.” It wasn’t that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn’t done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them.

Educators Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana want to turn the standard model on its head. They’ve founded the “Right Question Institute,” based on the idea that it’s much more effective to teach students to formulate and ask their own questions. It’s critical not just for the classroom, but for students’ lives.

Recently I had a conversation with a chief executive who expressed concern about several of her senior managers. They were smart, experienced, competent. So what was the problem? “They’re not asking enough questions,” she said.

The Right Question Institute's Andrew Minigan sits down for an interview with "Choose to be Curious" host Lynn Borton. They discuss the connections between questions and curiosity and work RQI is doing in higher education.

Normally Donour would have given students the goals of the lab and a step-by-step process to follow -- like a cookbook recipe -- because she wasn’t sure they had the ability to ask their own questions. This time, she showed students an image of firecrackers and guided them through the QFT to help them develop their own questions about what was going on in the image. “They were asking the same questions that I would have asked in developing the lab,” Donour said. “And that was a real shock for me.”

In his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, the writer, Wharton professor, and erstwhile magician Adam Grant explores the circumstances that give rise to truly original thinkers.

Luz Santana, Dan Rothstein and Agnes Bain agreed to answer a few questions about their new book, Partnering With Parents To Ask The Right Questions: A Powerful Strategy For Strengthening School-Family Partnerships (ASCD, 2016).

Where did you learn to ask questions? Did you know the skill of asking questions is not used, shared and definitely not taught very well? Even worse, educators are given little training and often indirectly discouraged from spending time on teaching the skill. There's good news with a deceptively simple solution to the problem. Its called the Question Formulation Technique and you have a chance to learn and experience it.

Brainstorming has developed a fraught reputation, perhaps deservedly so. When groups of people are thrown together and expected to come up with original ideas, there is often too much pressure to be creative–resulting in ideas that are anything but.