By Daniel Fouts Where was the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) 23 years ago? When I began teaching social studies in 1993, I relied on teacher-generated questions to frame my government curriculum. After first reading about the QFT in the September/ October 2011 edition of the Harvard Education Letter, I changed the way I teach. I […]
Educator Reflections
Educators share their insight and use of the Question Formulation Technique.
March 3, 2015
Student Questions, Shifting Classrooms
by Erica DeVoe The past three books I’ve read changed me. Actually, they defined me. No wait, they articulated what I’ve always known myself to be, but I had yet to articulate it for myself… and that, that is what saved me. Grant Lichtman’s The Falconer, Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question, and Santana and Rothstein’s […]
February 24, 2015
Student Engagement as Accountability: “Our Goal is for Our Students to Own Their Learning”
by Greg Graham How can we hold our students more accountable for their learning? This is a common question heard in schools today. We have asked this question many times in our own school. Are we asking the right question? Should we focus on student accountability or provide more opportunities for students to invest in […]
January 13, 2015
Not Just Starting Point: Student Research & The QFT
by Quentin Flokstra As a high school humanities teacher in a small school, I do a lot of projects. I like to foster in my students a quest to find interesting information and to understand the world that they live in. As such, I spent a lot of time talking to our librarian about best research […]
November 18, 2014
It’s Their Class Now! Building Classrooms of Curiosity
“Just curious” It’s a statement that has been near and dear to my heart for as long as I can remember. “Does life on other planets exist? Just curious.” “Is the Bible a real history book? Just curious.” “What was life like in the Americas before the Europeans arrived? Just curious.” A couple of years […]
October 28, 2014
What are you wondering when you hear…?: Student Engagement in a Project-Based Learning Primary Classroom
Inquiry-based learning has been getting a lot of attention lately for student engagement and developing 21st Century skills. Rather than being filled with teacher lectures, students are doing the research and driving the instruction. A lot of schools are adopting PBL to embrace this type of learning in the classroom. This acronym can mean Project-Based […]
October 7, 2014
“So Much More to Learn”: Boosting Student Engagement in Middle Schoolers
Joshua Beer discovered the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) while searching for more ways to integrate questions into his classroom. A middle school social studies teacher, Beer greatly encourages and promotes questions in his classroom and wanted to do more to get his students engaged in asking their own questions. Beer has been using the QFT […]
July 31, 2014
Using the QFT in the Professional Development of Librarians
When I was a building librarian, my partner and I always wanted students to develop those metacognitive skills in developing questions as they moved through the research process. Originally, we were moving them through another inquiry process and while this worked well with some students, many students and teachers felt that this method was too […]
June 3, 2014
Questions for Design: Asking Questions as Toolset
I am using the QFT to lead up to the design challenges of which my students would do at the end of the course which involve logo design, advertising, package design, typography and publication design. Before they do the actual challenges, students will use the QFT to ask questions about designing with restraint. The purpose […]
May 13, 2014
Teaching the QFT to Novice Teachers
As a teacher educator at Elon University, Jeff Carpenter works with students preparing to teach in seven different content areas and at multiple grade levels. The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) has been helpful in his work because it is a simple, flexible strategy that can be used at different grade levels and in any content […]
