Students as Questioners— the Question Formation Technique

Questions are powerful in learning and in life.

The Question Formation Technique is one simple tool for building students’ capacity as questioners while simultaneously promoting engagement and offering us powerful insights into student understanding and curiosity.

Do your students ask questions?  What kind of questions?  How do you respond?  What kind of questions do we, as educators, ask our students and ourselves?

On the food and cooking podcast The Splendid Table, host Francis Lam observed, "You can only really be bored if you've stopped learning how to ask the right questions of things. And if you learn to ask questions of things, literally anything can be bottomless interesting."  Curiosity can drive interest, help us make connections between new encounters and what we already know, facilitate deep learning, aid problem-solving, and spark innovation.

Researchers have observed that children ask the most questions before they enter school.  Preschoolers ask their parents an average of 100 questions a day.  By middle school, children ask almost no questions at all.  A 2013 Gallop poll showed student engagement peeks in elementary school at 78% and falls steadily to only 44% in high school.  Engaged students are interested and curious.  Conversely, when people are curious, they are engaged.  Engaged learners make connections and learn more deeply.   While this Gallop study is nearly 10 years old, it seems unlikely the trend has reversed, given the continued dominance of standardized testing and a “right-answer” orientation within school systems.  

Empowering students to ask questions through cultivating a culture of inquiry and ownership of learning can advance curricular goals and set students on a path toward a life of learning, problem-solving, and success.  Further, intentionally modeling and teaching students how to ask varied, quality questions provides them a powerful tool for life. Life contexts such as navigating medical care, engaging in civic society, and making personal decisions illustrate the importance of well-developed questioning skills.

Many educators have written about helping students grow as questioners.  One simple and effective model, the Question Formation Technique (QFT), comes from the Right Question Institute.  Originally created in the context of a drop-out prevention program to help empower parents to ask questions and effectively advocate for students’ needs, the QFT has now been applied across many contexts, including K-12 education.  The basic premise is simple—teach people to brainstorm in questions, improve their questions toward their purpose, and prioritize questions for action.  

In a classroom, this structured question-brainstorming activity can launch a unit of study, be used as formative assessment, generate topics for research or projects, or lay out an engaging guide for a unit of study among many other possibilities.  One action study found that kindergarteners who had studied the QFT asked five times more on-topic questions than a comparable sample.  All of the Right Question Institute’s materials are available for free use, and the videos and printed materials are enough to help educators prepare to try the Question Formation Technique with students.  

Among the most critical questions we ask ourselves as educators: How do we engage our students? How do we empower them as curious, creative, motivated learners throughout their lives?  Check out the Question Formation Technique as one simple tool.  Let’s get them asking questions!