The Question Formulation Technique is a flexible tool that can complement and enhance any curriculum, standard, subject, or framework. Educational organizations in a range of disciplines have incorporated the QFT into their resources for teachers, whether as a warm up activity in a lesson plan or embedded as a foundational practice throughout a curriculum.
It’s a win-win: On the one hand, a lot of content benefits from a highly engaging, inquiry-based pedagogy that gets students genuinely interested and invested in learning it. On the other, the QFT, and those who use it, benefit from seeing applications of that pedagogy in specific content that provide ways for students’ questions to be put to good use advancing learning objectives. A hesitation some people will name about the QFT is that it takes time away from content, but these examples show that inquiry and academically rigorous, standards-aligned content don’t have to be opposed; in fact, students’ questions can be a very useful shortcut to your curriculum objectives.
We’ve gathered a list of a few recent examples of educator resources that integrate QFT, from organizations around the country, in social studies, science, and other disciplines. For teachers, we hope they inspire you to try the QFT for the first time or be able to better answer “what to do next?” with students’ questions after the QFT. For other education organizations that don’t yet see yourselves in this list, let us know how we can collaborate and incorporate the QFT into what you’re doing.
1. Comparing Pre- and Post-Colonial Maps of North America
The Bill of Rights Institute teaches civics to both teachers and students alike so that we can all better live out the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
QFT Resource Highlight: Their Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness curriculum for AP US History teachers kicks off in chapter 1 lesson 1 with a QFT lesson. In it, students compare maps of North America pre- and post- European colonization. This lesson is meant to help students start to question and predict themes and trends in the period of American history that occurred between these two maps.
2. Questioning Throughout a k-5 Science Curriculum, in Engish and Spanish
The Boards of Cooperative Educational Services of New York State (BOCES) serve 37 school districts across the state, providing district-level advocacy, leadership, and professional development services.
QFT Resource Highlight: A k-5 science curriculum called Science 21 developed by the team at the Putnam | Northern Westchester BOCES is now in about 700 classrooms per grade level, and serves about 120,000 children in the state of New York. The curriculum embeds the QFT into many of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade units as students investigate and make sense of scientific phenomena. The website itself is for BOCES teachers and requires a log in, but all can use their QFT slides in both English and Spanish here.
3. Exploring Social Movements Around the World
The Choices Program is a self-funded organization affiliated with Brown University that writes high-quality, scholar-approved curriculum units for high school classrooms that connect history with critical current issues around the globe.
QFT Resource Highlight: The Choices Program free Teaching with the News lesson titled, “Taking it the Streets: Global Protests During the Pandemic” presents students with photographs of some of the many protests that took off around the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic as prompts for questioning. It then utilizes the QFT to guide students in collectively refining their questions for use in conducting research via news and media outlets about the origins, causes, and connections between protest movements around the world. The Confronting Genocide: Never Again? curriculum unit also includes a QFT-aligned lesson about constructing compelling questions.
4. Using EBSCO’s Time Magazine Archive with the QFT
EBSCO Information Services provides research databases, academic journal subscription management, and much more to libraries, universities, schools, and other institutions around the world.
QFT Resource Highlight: EBSCO Connect is a service that provides supplementary tools and resources to enhance the use of EBSCO’s services. Two teacher-written, QFT-focused lesson plans featured on EBSCO Connect show how original magazine pages from EBSCO’s TIme Magazine Archive could be used as primary sources in the classroom.
5. Uncovering Why Some Chicken Eggs Do Not Hatch in Middle School Science
Edutopia is a leading producer of educational video content showcasing the most meaningful and innovative practices happening in classrooms today.
QFT Resource Highlight: Edutopia recently produced a video of Nicole Bolduc’s 7th grade science classroom, in which Bolduc integrates the QFT into the anchoring phenomena routine at the start of her units. In the video, Bolduc’s students investigate their own questions about the puzzling fact that some eggs hatch while others do not, and get to raise their own chicks in the process. Edutopia has published several other articles on the QFT, including Are Questions the Answer? And Who Wants to Know? Use Student Questions to Drive Learning.
6. Examining Primary Sources with English Language Learners
Emerging America supports teachers to help all of their students, including multilingual learners and students with disabilities, to access inquiry, analyze primary source documents, and think critically about the American experience, both locally and globally.
QFT Resource Highlight: Emerging America hosts the TPS resources of the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies. They worked with language experts to develop a set of “language-aware” lesson examples for elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, to serve as models for how to support language acquisition while teaching content and how to help multilingual students access primary source-rich instruction. The third grade lesson, about colonial daily life, includes the QFT.
7. Supporting Students to Develop Better Research Questions
National History Day is a beloved national educational organization that has been engaging teachers and empowering students to conduct their own historical research for the last 50 years.
QFT Resource Highlight: As part of a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program, National History Day developed a free, comprehensive, downloadable “Guide to Student Research and Historical Argumentation”, which is chock full of instructional strategies and guidance on how to support student-led, primary source-rich historical research from start to finish. Chapter 2 focuses on using the Question Formulation Technique to help students in generating and refining questions throughout the research process.
8. Deep Dives into Redlining, Climate Change, More Eye-Opening American History
New American History is a project supported by the University of Richmond that creates dynamic digital resources that explore America’s past in unique and eye-opening ways, centered on our understanding of the present.
QFT Resource Highlight: Several of their lesson plans for students and teachers feature the QFT, including lessons on redlining and public health, climate change, how Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia became ‘Freedom’s Fortress’, and the myth of Columbus.
9. Asking Questions and Gathering Data to Rescue the Penguins
Polar Literacy is a National Science Foundation grant-funded project developed by educators and researchers at Ohio State University, Rutgers University, and more that develops Out of School Time (OST) programs and resources, engaging young students in exciting science explorations that connect them to real world data, scientists, and phenomena from the polar regions.
QFT Resource Highlight: Data to the Rescue: Penguins Need Our Help! is a multi-session afterschool club science challenge, in which students participate in a simulated polar expedition, acting as a team of scientists to collaborate, problem solve, and ultimately take action to help penguins and fight climate change. Club Meeting #6, called “Question Land” and described in the facilitator guide, focuses exclusively on teaching students to ask scientific questions using the QFT.
10. Investigating the Origins of Genetically Engineered Foods
Retro Report creates compelling award-winning short documentary videos on important stories in our news and culture that connect the past to the present.
QFT Resource Highlight: One of their lesson plans for teachers features the QFT. In it, students watch a documentary video created by Retro Report in 2013 about the first genetically engineered food on the market. Then, students use the QFT to think critically about both the content of the video and how the video was made, planning how they as investigative journalists would update it for this moment, 10+ years later.
On RQI’s site:
Here is a short list of a few more resources connecting the QFT with other curriculums and frameworks. These resources can be accessed from RQI’s Teaching + Learning Resources page.
- QFT in the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum: QFT in the AP Sciences | QFT in AP Literature | QFT in AP Calculus
- QFT in the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum
- QFT as part of a Project-Based Learning (PBL) curriculum
- QFT and the C3 Framework: Questions, Frameworks, and Classrooms | Stimulating and Sustaining Inquiry with Students’ Questions
- QFT and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS): 5 Tips for Blending QFT with NGSS | Questioning the Traditional Lesson Structure