A More Beautiful Question (10 page)

I asked Andraka whether his classmates asked a lot of questions. “In my high school, to be quote-unquote cool, you’re typically very quiet and sit in the corner, and you might snicker among your friends every now and then. So that, to me, is pretty boring.” As for himself, Andraka said, “Either I’m extremely quiet and working on something else like trying to find a new way to test for pancreatic cancer, for example, or I’m basically answering every single question. But I don’t ask questions like ‘What would happen if this happens?’ I do that on my own—I do all of my exploring outside of school. Because in school it’s not allowed and that just . . . really sucks.”

If even a born-and-bred questioner such as Andraka isn’t asking questions in school, it suggests a fundamental problem. Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana of the Right Question Institute say it’s no mystery what’s going on: Even in the most progressive schools, questioning is still primarily the domain of the teacher. “Questions are used a lot in the classroom but it’s mostly one-way,” says Rothstein. “It’s not about the student asking, it’s about the teacher prompting the student by using questions that the teacher has formulated.” By taking this approach, Rothstein says, teachers “have inadvertently contributed to the professionalization of asking questions—to the idea that only the people who know more are allowed to ask.”

After two decades of studying and teaching questioning, Rothstein and Santana hope their three-year-old Right Question Institute—young as a toddler, and just as enamored of questions—can help shift the balance of power in classrooms by putting the kids in charge of the questions.

If we’re born to inquire, then why must it be taught?

When the Boston high school teacher
³³
Ling-Se Peet used the Right Question Institute’s “Question Formulation Technique” for the first time in her humanities class, she began by laying out a provocative premise to her twenty-five students:
Torture can be justified
.

In the parlance of Rothstein and Santana, this opening statement is known as a Q-focus because its purpose is to provide a focal point for generating questions from the students. Peet’s class was divided into small groups, and each group’s initial task was to come up with as many questions as possible, within a time limit, pertaining to that statement.

After reviewing a set of rules (write each question down, don’t debate or try to answer questions, just keep trying to think of more questions), the students in each group began to come at that premise from a variety of angles. Some questions aimed at bringing clarity to the issue:
How do you define torture? When is torture used?
Some were offbeat yet intriguing:
Can torture make you happy?
Other questions expanded the scope of the discussion:
Does torture have anything to do with justice?
Who are most likely to be tortured?

The kids had no experience doing this type of questioning exercise, but according to Peet, after some initial reservations about the rules (some felt that questions ought to be answered as soon as they were raised), the questions began to flow freely within each group, with each written down by a group member. Then the students were directed to the second stage of the exercise: They were instructed to change open questions to closed ones, and vice versa—so that, for example, an open question that began as
Why is torture effective?
might be changed to a closed one:
Is torture effective?
The purpose of this part of the exercise, according to Rothstein, is to show that a question can be narrowed down in some cases, or expanded in others. As students do this, he says, they begin to see that “the way you ask a question yields different results and can lead you in different directions.”

Next, the students were asked to “prioritize” their questions: to figure out which three were the most important to move the discussion forward. Rothstein and Santana stress the importance of this “convergent” part of questioning. They feel it’s not enough to encourage students to toss out questions endlessly; to question effectively, they must learn how to analyze their own questions and zero in on ones they would like to pursue further.

Some of the questions from the student groups that made it through to this final stage included
Why does torture work?
Who decides whether torture should be justified or not?
How can someone’s pain be the price for the outcome you want?

By the end of the session, Rothstein observed, some of the kids “looked spent.” The process is difficult, he acknowledges, because “it requires them to do something they’ve never done—to think in questions.” But in this class, and in others where the Right Question Institute’s technique has been tried, a high level of engagement among students has been observed. This may be partly because Rothstein and Santana cleverly designed the process with gamelike rules (only questions allowed; any nonquestion must be turned into a question) that inject an element of play into it. And perhaps questions, by their very nature, invite and allow for more participation by more kids throughout the class. You don’t have to know the answer to ask a question, so the smart kids don’t dominate. Rothstein thinks it also has something to do with the students’ tendency to quickly become invested in the questions they’ve thought of on their own. “The ‘ownership’ part of this is very important,” he said. “We’ve had kids say that when you ask your own question, you then feel like it’s your job to get the answer.”

The question process Rothstein and Santana developed was years in the making. It didn’t start out being for kids in school—it was originally intended to help adults use questioning more effectively in their dealings with government bureaucrats, doctors, landlords, and school officials.

Luz Santana knew from firsthand experience
³⁴
that those who don’t know how to ask the right questions are vulnerable to being denied that which they might need or are entitled to have. Santana migrated to the United States from Puerto Rico when she was in her twenties and, after initially being on welfare, found a job working in a factory. “Then I got laid off,” she told me, “and as I tried to navigate the social services system to get into a job training program, I was denied.”

Santana didn’t know how to properly inquire as to
why
she was turned down; “I didn’t know how to advocate for myself,” she says. She was fortunate that as she was being denied, another social worker intervened on her behalf, pointing out that Santana actually
was
qualified for the program. Santana entered the training program, got a job, simultaneously went back to school, and eventually earned a master’s degree. But she never forgot that early lesson about the need for people, especially those disadvantaged, to be able to effectively speak up for themselves. She ended up going into social services work herself, as a housing advocate in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

There she met Rothstein—who had a very different background (Kentucky bred, Harvard educated) but similar interests. Rothstein had gotten his doctorate in education at Harvard, where he was intrigued by this question:

What can the people thinking about social problems or making social policy learn from the people who are actually affected by those problems?

As Rothstein gravitated toward urban policy work, he became a director of neighborhood planning in Lawrence and met Santana at a gathering on housing problems in the city. Toward the end of the meeting, from the periphery of the room, Santana raised her hand and asked whether the city was getting enough input from the people actually affected by the housing problems being discussed. “And I thought that would have been a great question to
start
the meeting with,” Rothstein recalls.

Subsequently, Rothstein asked for Santana’s help with the launch of a high school dropout-prevention program in Lawrence. While working on the program, they became aware of a particular obstacle: parents clearly needed to be more involved in their children’s education and in school policies affecting those kids—yet many of the parents refused to attend school meetings.

Rothstein and Santana logically asked,
Why?
“They told us they didn’t go to the meetings because they didn’t even know what questions to ask,” Rothstein recalls.

This was a lightbulb moment for the two of them:
What if we could find a way to help parents ask better questions at school meetings?

They had their What If question, but as they proceeded to the How stage of trying to act on it, they took a wrong turn. Rothstein and Santana thought the most efficient way to help parents ask better questions at school meetings would be to supply them with those questions. So the two of them began compiling questions for various situations (questioning school budgetary decisions, questioning why a child was being suspended, etc.) and gave them to the parents to take to the meetings.

“We went to one of the meetings where the parents had these question lists,” Santana recalls, “and they’d go up to the microphone and read questions from the list. But as soon as
they
were asked a question by someone from the school, they’d turn back to us, like,
What do I do now?
” Santana says she and her partner quickly understood their mistake: “We realized that the parents needed to think on their own—and come up with their own questions.”

Rothstein and Santana began coaching parents how to do that. In particular, they taught them how to inquire about school decisions that most affected them—which meant probing the reasons behind the decisions, the process that led to those decisions, and the role parents could play in that process.

As the program went along, a few parents revealed something surprising: They were using these same questioning techniques in other situations, outside the school meetings—while trying to get information from a doctor in the emergency room, or in settling a dispute with a landlord.

This led Rothstein and Santana to begin to expand their question-teaching process and try it out in a variety of situations. They began working with health clinics, social services agencies, and adult education programs around the country. They found that their questioning techniques
³⁵
were being used by immigrant parents in New Mexico, residents at a homeless shelter in Louisville, and sugarcane-plantation workers in Hawaii. Rothstein and Santana formed a nonprofit organization, which, in 2011, came to be known as the Right Question Institute.

As their questioning technique was slowly gaining traction in adult education programs, something interesting happened: Adult-ed teachers reported that some adult students, upon learning the technique, were wondering,
Why didn’t I learn this in high school?
Which, in turn, led to another What If moment for Rothstein and Santana:

What if we take our adult question-formulation program and adapt it for school-age kids?

Rothstein and Santana then designed a program for K–12 classrooms, broken down into a series of steps:

Teachers design a Question Focus
(e.g., “Torture can be justified”).

Students produce questions
(no help from the teacher; no answering or debating the questions; write down every question; change any statements into questions).

Students improve their questions
(opening and closing them).

Students prioritize their questions.
They are typically instructed to come to agreement on three favorites.

Students and teachers decide on next steps,
for acting on the prioritized questions.

Students reflect on what they have learned.

The process is designed to be simple enough that teachers can learn it in an hour, and students can grasp it immediately. However, making it simple was hard—that basic formula took about a decade to produce.

The RQI technique has drawn widespread praise from teachers. When her students start thinking in questions, observes the Boston high school teacher Marcy Ostberg, it “seems to unlock something for them.”
³⁶
Rothstein says teachers have been lining up for RQI sessions at teacher conferences. “When they come to the sessions and learn about it,” he said, “they’re slapping their heads and saying,
How come we’ve never done this before?
”

The social critic Neil Postman wondered
³⁷
about this more than two decades ago, when he wrote about the importance of questioning in education and posed this query of his own:

“
Is it not curious, then, that the most significant intellectual skill available to human beings is not taught in schools?
”

Rothstein was asked in a newspaper interview why there has been a long-standing failure to teach questioning, and whether it’s because:

•        
We don’t think it needs to be taught, or

•        
We don’t know how to teach it.

“My answer to that is yes and yes,” he said. Regarding that first rationale, Rothstein says that questioning is thought of simply as “a natural part of speech” and something people do instinctively. Many, including Deborah Meier, feel that kids are born questioners, and that we don’t need to teach it—we just have to stop discouraging it. But Rothstein maintains that questioning is a more subtle and complex skill than many realize, involving three kinds of sophisticated thinking—divergent, convergent, and metacognitive. Some of it comes naturally to kids, but some must be learned and practiced. Since questioning seems to drop off at around age five, the innate questioning skills we start out with have long been neglected by junior high and high school. By that time, “the question-asking muscle,” as Rothstein calls it, has atrophied and needs to be built up.