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Overview of The Question Formulation Technique

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Overview of The Question Formulation Technique

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An Overview of the Question Formulation Technique™ (QFT™)

Step 1: Teachers Design a Question Focus. The Question Focus, or QFocus, is a prompt that can
be presented in the form of a statement or a visual or aural aid to focus and attract student attention and
quickly stimulate the formation of questions. The QFocus is different from many traditional prompts
because it is not a teacher’s question. It serves, instead, as the focus for student questions so students
can, on their own, identify and explore a wide range of themes and ideas.

Step 2: Students Produce Questions. Students use a set of rules that provide a clear protocol for
producing questions without assistance from the teacher. The four rules are: ask as many questions as
you can; do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of the questions; write down every question exactly
as it was stated; and change any statements into questions. Before students start generating their
questions, the teacher introduces the rules and asks the students to think about and discuss possible
challenges in following them. Once the students get to work, the rules provide a firm structure for an
open-ended thinking process. Students are able to generate questions and think more broadly than they
would have if they had not been guided by the rules.

Step 3: Students Improve Their Questions. Students then improve their questions by analyzing the
differences between open- and closed-ended questions and by practicing changing one type to the
other. The teacher begins this step by introducing definitions of closed- and open-ended questions. The
students use the definitions to categorize the list of questions they have just produced into one of the two
categories. Then, the teacher leads them through a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of
both kinds of questions. To conclude this step, the teacher asks the students to change at least one
open-ended question into a closed-ended one, and vice versa, which leads students to think about how
the phrasing of a question can affect the depth, quality, and value of the information they will obtain.

Step 4: Students Prioritize Their Questions. The teacher, with the lesson plan in mind, offers
criteria or guidelines for the selection of priority questions. In an introduction to a unit, the instruction may
be, “Choose the three questions you most want to explore further.” When designing a science
experiment, it may be, “Choose three testable questions.” An essay related to a work of fiction may
require that students select “three questions related to the key themes we’ve identified in this piece.”
During this phase, students move from thinking divergently to thinking convergently, zero in on the locus
of their inquiry, and plan concrete action steps for getting information they need to complete the lesson or
task.

Step 5: Students and Teachers Decide on Next Steps. At this stage, students and teachers work
together to decide how to use the questions. One teacher, for example, presented all the groups’ priority
questions to the entire class the next day during a “Do Now” exercise and asked them to rank their top
three questions. Eventually, the class and the teacher agreed on this question for their Socratic Seminar
discussion: “How do poverty and injustice lead to violence in A Tale of Two Cities?”

Step 6: Students Reflect on W hat They Have Learned. The teacher reviews the steps and
provides students with an opportunity to review what they have learned by producing, improving, and
prioritizing their questions. Making the QFT completely transparent helps students see what they have
done and how it contributed to their thinking and learning. They can internalize the process and then
apply it in many other settings.

When teachers deploy the QFT in their classes, they notice three important changes in classroom culture
and practices. Teachers tell us that using the QFT consistently increases participation in group and peer
learning processes, improves classroom management, and enhances their efforts to address inequities in
education. As teachers see this happen again and again, they realize that their traditional practice of
welcoming questions is not the same as deliberately teaching the skill of question formulation.

Please  visit  www.rightquestion.org    for  additional  resources  or  to  make  use  of  and/or  share  the  Question  Formulation  Technique™  
© 2001 – 2012 The Right Question Institute (QFT™).  To  do  so  the  QFT™  is  offered  under  a  Creative  Commons  Attribution-­Noncommercial-­Sharealike  License  Version  3.0  (the  
www.rightquestion.org “License”).    The  License  governs  the  use  of  the  QFT™  and  includes  limitations  that,  among  others,  permit  use  of  the  QFT™  only  for  non-­
commercial  purposes.  You  can  review  the  complete  terms  of  the  license  at  the  above  link,  or,  for  a  short  summary  of  its  terms  visit  our  
  Terms  of  Use  page.          

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