Helping Students to Ask the Right Questions

The folks at Project Information Literacy recently interviewed Dan Rothstein, co-author of the 2011 book Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions. Rothstein’s work focuses on helping teachers change their approach from asking the right questions of students to encouraging students to ask their own questions. It’s a seemingly simple distinction, but arms students with metacognition skills that are transferrable to other classes and into the world outside the classroom. Knowing what questions to ask is an essential skill for citizens in a democratic society. The method Rothstein and his co-author developed is called the “Question Formulation Technique.” It provides basic rules that students can use to draft questions, shift close-ended questions to open-ended questions and vice versa, prioritize those questions, and reflect upon them. It was designed to be simple (and certainly doesn’t seem radical on first blush), but the approach reportedly changes classroom dynamics for the better and gives students the power to direct their own learning. Take a look at the interview “Dan Rothstein: The Necessity of Asking Questions” for more detail and examples.