How can educators help young people build the confidence, agency, and self-advocacy skills they will need beyond the classroom? How can they connect those skills to work opportunities in a rapidly changing economy?
Those questions are at the heart of the Workforce Opportunities through Research and Knowledge (W.O.R.K.) summer program, led by Siva Visveswaran, director of Finger Lakes Workforce Development Center in Rochester, NY. The W.O.R.K. program supports students from under-resourced communities to learn about growing career fields in Rochester while building their confidence for civic and professional life.
Rochester is experiencing rapid growth in the fields of science, engineering, and advanced manufacturing. Few young people, however, have had opportunities to learn about the range of careers these fields now offer.
Expanding students’ awareness of those opportunities is only part of the work. As Visveswaran explains, they also need practice asking thoughtful questions that help them explore those possibilities for themselves. For Visveswaran, the Question Formulation Technique offered a natural way to bring that practice into the program.
The role of question-asking for a new generation of workers–and civic agents
Early in the program, Laurie Jackson, an educator and QFT facilitator, led students through two separate QFT processes. Each QFT gave students the opportunity to ask questions about two important aspects of the program: career readiness, and community engagement.
The first QFT focused on students’ own career and economic futures. With the question focus, “First day on the job,” students positioned themselves as someone starting a new job, expressing their ambitions, concerns, and uncertainties in questions such as:
- What are the benefits of working here?
- How many people will be working with me?
- How long does it take to receive a promotion?
- Will they feed me?
- Do they offer breaks?
- What’s the dress code?
- How can I better apply myself in this work field?
- What opportunities are there to progress in the job?
These became a starting point for exploring the career preparation topics introduced throughout the program.
The second QFT widened the focus to students’ communities, to jumpstart a final project around how students could improve their communities. In response to the second QFocus, “Improving our neighborhood,” students identified local needs and considered the role young people could play in addressing them:
- Does the neighborhood had parks?
- Are people safe?
- Are there youth programs, health clinics, grocery stores?
- Do we have community leaders?
- Are there shelters?
- Does the population has guns?
- Is the neighborhood friendly?
- Are there jobs/opportunities in this area?
- How are the housing conditions?
“They really got into it,” Jackson says. “They were like, ‘Wait a minute. We need these things.’ They were really very thoughtful.”
One student shared the reflection, “Today I taught myself how to ask questions. Before I get ahead of myself, we had an amazing speaker who…taught us the steps to asking great questions. We basically taught ourselves but she gave us the steps. I feel like I accomplished something big today and I feel great!”
Using questions to identify and solve real-life problems
The questions they developed became a thread through later conversations about careers, community issues, and their own futures, giving students a more active role in shaping their learning across workshops on communication, resume building, financial literacy, teamwork, and more.
The questions also became the foundation for students’ final community projects. Working in teams, students identified a local problem, framed it through their questions, and developed a proposed solution with goals, funding needs, and an implementation plan.
The significance of these projects extended beyond the program itself, with some groups developing proposals they could continue advancing in their communities. One group focused on gun violence, proposing to partner with several local organizations to prevent bullying in middle schools. Another group titled their project “Behind the Smiles,” with the mission “to improve mental health in our teen community through daily check-ins and hands-on workshops, creating a safe space to share struggles, learn coping skills and feel supported.”
Carrying questions forward in the age of AI
Students made use of many skills gained in the summer program to research and design their presentations, including practice with critical use of AI. Visveswaran is a strong proponent of equipping young people to effectively harness Large Language Models (LLMs). Because LLMs are known to “hallucinate,” delivering unreliable or nonsensical results, students must be able to ask good questions and discern fact from fiction. Another part of the program focused on preparing students for this AI-driven world through a session on LLMs and advanced prompting. Students drew on their questions from the QFT to develop more focused prompts and conduct research using LLMs.
After successfully incorporating the QFT into the W.O.R.K. program, Visveswaran is eager to spread the word about its efficacy, and will continue using it in the program this July. “I think this is a very, very powerful tool,” he says, adding that industries are no longer looking to see if young people can simply regurgitate knowledge:
“They don’t care which book you look at or what tool you’re going to use. Ultimately, are you going to be able to solve the problem? Are you going to be innovative? Are you going to be productive? That’s what the industry is looking for. We need, as educators, I say we need to rethink how we think about what we teach. We need to let students be able to frame questions that can solve problems innovatively, and that’s basically what it is. And we should encourage them to use AI tools…If they know how to ask questions, if they know how to discern fact from fiction, I think that’s what we should care about and they should be able to use anything else.”