RQI: Looking Back, Encouraging Forward

In the words of artist Antony Gormley, we are “trying to make work that is reflective and is encouraging of reflection.” This year has been a transformative year for our organization and seeing the growth and conversation about the value and impact of our educational strategy has made us very excited for our future. With our expanding Educator Network and growing staff and dynamic interns we have hit some major milestones and want to take this time to reflect and look forward in the New Year. Education: Educators are learning the strategy one day and teaching it the next! We find our first achievement in the continued success of Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask their Own Questions. Written by our co-directors: Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, Make Just One Change has sold close to 15,000 copies and remains one of the top­ viewed books on the Harvard Education Press website ­even two years later. This success is matched only by our online Educator Network, which now boasts nearly 5,000 members. In the coming months, we will be thinking about how to best support and develop this community. We have recently been reaching out to them for more examples and resources to better implement our technique across grade level and subject matter. In addition to offering the strategy online, we have had the opportunity to engage with educators and administrators through our in-person Summer Seminars. This past summer, coming together from around the country and Canada, educators shared their experiences of implementing the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) or gained insights on how to integrate the technique into their classrooms for the first time. One teacher described the method as “encouraging self-­direction and curiosity about a topic… you can use it with any subject”.  We’re looking to our 2014 Summer Seminar in Boston and (we’re considering adding a West Coast Seminar)! Classroom Application: 

• Educators and students in McComb, Mississippi reach nation-wide acclaim implementing the Question Formulation Technique. In McComb, Teaching for Change with support from the Kellogg Foundation introduced the QFT as part of their McComb Legacies civil rights history project. Recently, high school students from McComb led peers at a statewide conference through the QFT and then won the National History Day State Award.

• This year also found The Right Question Institute in higher education with a speaking engagement and workshop at two New England universities. More recently, the University of Maine at Farmington, the state's largest teacher education program, featured our work in their 150th Anniversary Celebration of their founding. Secondly we hosted a session with faculty at the Lesley Graduate School of Education. We’re looking forward to collaborating with Teacher Training institutions so that all educators think about how to get students to ask their own questions

  Healthcare: We’re expanding our patient engagement work and will be offering resources soon! We have also expanded our healthcare patient engagement work, thanks to generous funding from the Whitman Institute, the Germanacos Foundation, the Herman and Frieda L. Miller Foundation and the Bushrod H. Campbell and Adah F. Hall Charity Fund. In August we hired our first Patient Engagement Fellow, Rebecca Howe. She has been working closely with Luz and the rest of the RQI team to reach out to health care partners to help them integrate the Right Question-Effective Patient Strategy (RQ-EPS) into their clinical settings. We taught the RQ-EPS to a team of community health workers last fall and are excited to share the strategy with even more health providers in our first healthcare seminar this coming spring. In reflecting, we hope to show how our work is centered on empowering communities across the country. From our staff to our network to our interns, the Right Question Institute is working toward encouraging micro-democracy by illustrating how asking questions and participating in decisions and discussions is central to building a strong democratic foundation. The ability to ask your own questions is a foundational skill for self-advocacy, democratic participation, and self-directed learning! Stay Connected! Stay connected, whether you are in our Network, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or are just learning about RQI and the Question Formulation Technique. We want to hear how you’re using the Question Formulation Technique and how you’re encouraging questioning. We are looking for ways to easily share the strategy with practitioners and support implementation.   Here are some ways you can help:

• Buy and share Make Just One Change
• Donate to help us build a stronger online infrastructure, provide scholarships to educators to attend the summer seminar, and more!

  But most of all we hope you encourage your communities to ask more questions as way to strengthen democracy. 

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This is a post by our social media intern Jay Dodd. Jay  is a Tufts University senior from Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Sociology and English.