When Patty Gómez transitioned from a career in material science engineering into K-12 education twenty years ago, she felt a need for tools — simple, actionable, pragmatic interventions — to address challenges she encountered in her classroom. Wearing her scientist’s hat, she felt that these tools had to exist somewhere, just as she had seen in other industries.
Patty now chairs the World Language Department at an independent school in South Florida. Her search for accessible, scalable tools eventually led her to enroll in the Right Question Institute’s Harvard course, Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions: Best Practices in the Question Formulation Technique.
“It elicits deeper thinking”
The Question Formulation Technique, or QFT, has provided an anchor for sustained transformation not only of Patty’s own teaching, but of her entire department’s way of working and communicating.
“The QFT was the single most powerful tool that as an educator I had encountered,” Patty says. “Both in the classroom and in faculty collaborative sessions, the QFT is a clear protocol, easy to use and yet so powerful. It elicits deeper thinking and makes participants and facilitators alike question assumptions in an emotionally safe environment.”
What began as a classroom activity has become an invaluable way for Patty and her team of faculty to engage in challenging conversations about their work as educators and transform these often charged discussions into productive and energizing ones.
“Sometimes, teachers can have a hard time finding common ground in our practices,” Patty observes. “It’s hard to realize that something we may have been doing for a while might be in need of significant changes or even small tweaks. That’s usually the end of the conversation.”
A department-wide conversation about assessments
As chair of a large department (there are 28 teachers in three divisions from K-12), Patty wondered how she could spark a more amenable conversation about difficult topics — not incidentally but systematically. By now she had seen how successful the QFT was in encouraging agency and engagement among her students. Could the answer to her quandary be to use the same techniques with faculty?
If the QFT could not only benefit students, she thought, but also help improve the dynamics of teachers’ work together as professionals, then we might really be onto something. She decided to give it a try, hoping it would at least give the team a way to enter into a conversation.
Patty chose the topic of assessments as the focus for the experiment, having observed over the years that conversations about other important topics, such as learning objectives or instructional methods, quickly became so heated that the subject of assessments usually fell by the wayside. Patty hoped that by starting there, she could “back-engineer” a process by which teachers would eventually be able to bring in other topics for reflection.
She proposed to her school administrators an intentionally designed series of sessions using already designated work time, leveraging the QFT as well as two other processes — the Tuning Protocol and the Collaborative Assessment Protocol — to address questions that were fundamental for continued program evolution and consistency across divisions. For example, what does it mean to be proficient in a language? What are indicators of learning beyond the mastery of grammar rules? Does an “A” in one class communicate the same as an “A” in any other?
“The power of the collective experience”
Patty admits she was a little nervous to introduce the QFT to her colleagues. What if the experiment totally bombed? But at this point, she had enough experience with the method to feel confident that teachers would soon recognize it wasn’t a haphazard gimmick or the latest fad. She went into the first faculty meeting free of any agenda of her own, and focused on facilitating a process of discovery.
Three semesters later, the QFT is firmly embedded in the culture and practices of the entire world language faculty. It has become integral to how professional development is conducted for their team.
The secret to the technique’s power, Patty reflects, is that it’s a facilitated conversation with clear rules that elicit reflective practice, both individually and collectively. “It really leads to a mindset change,” she says. “The power of the collective experience is the catalyst for such change.” Because of this collective mindset shift, the changes made using the QFT have a built-in sustainability, Patty finds.
Coming up with changes as a team
Patty facilitates the team’s collaborative work sessions using the QFT to open and sometimes also to close these sessions. The meetings have a clearly defined structure but no identified outcomes. “Nothing I could imagine or prescribe could be better than what actually happens, than what the group ends up producing at the end of each session,” Patty says.
Among the most significant outcomes of this initiative has been that Patty and her team are now developing common understandings about their teaching and assessment practices as a group, not in isolation. They have reliable and easy-to-adapt thinking protocols at hand to tackle complex issues. No one feels forced to change, Patty reports. Everyone has an equal share in creating their next steps as a department.
With the help of the QFT, the department has made refinements to align their teaching and grading. “We came up with any changes as a team,” Patty says. “Now we are in the business of constantly improving our assessments for the benefit of our students. Our goal is to offer equitable opportunities for growth and valuable feedback to them.”
Uplifted spirits, energized teamwork
The process of integrating the QFT into professional development has been gradual but steady, accompanied by a palpable feeling of uplifted spirits and energized teamwork. Patty credits several key factors for the success of the initiative:
- Consistency in use of the QFT and other thinking protocols in every meeting.
- Re-purposing of regularly scheduled department meetings for practicing the techniques.
- Increasing the frequency of opportunities to engage together.
- Keeping the focus on one actionable goal and trusting that other important issues will be addressed in the process.
With enthusiastic buy-in of the faculty and the full support of the school administration, in the last two school years, the World Languages Department has more than doubled the amount of time they spend working together. With eight sessions structured around a Question Focus (four full days plus another four two-hour meetings) there is more time for everyone to reflect upon and integrate their discoveries.
In addition, at the teachers’ request, Patty has led two workshops for world languages faculty introducing the Question Formulation Technique as an instructional method. Many of the teachers have effectively incorporated the QFT as a teaching tool in their own classrooms. Four other teachers in the department have also taken the Harvard course.
Meanwhile, Patty continues to work on her doctoral action research project in the field of leadership and learning in organization — based on her fieldwork and observation of teams of educators working around thinking protocols such as the QFT. She is expanding the network, coalescing the efforts, and collaborating with other K-12 teachers around the country and the world who are also spearheading communities of practice or professional learning communities using the power of the QFT.