For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about enhancing educational methods through the strategic use of questioning.
In December of 2015 the John Templeton Foundation approved a three-year, $700,000 grant to the Cambridge, Mass.-based Right Question Institute with the ambitious goal of empowering teachers in a million primary and secondary-school classrooms worldwide to teach their students to ask better questions. The institute’s approach, distilled into a streamlined Question Formulation Technique (QFT), guides students through a process of generating questions, prioritizing, and reflecting on what they learned as a means to identify the most important and most interesting questions. The ultimate goal is to engage a student’s curiosity and creativity in developing good questions, a technique that is unfortunately not currently part of standard curriculum. Despite limited formal marketing, the QFT has already been adopted by tens of thousands of teachers, many of whom have become enthusiastic evangelists for the technique.
All of which got Right Question Institute co-directors Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana wondering: can what works well in a primary or secondary classroom be applied to a graduate school seminar? This past August, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the Right Question Institute an additional $300,000 to explore bringing the QFT to university, graduate and postgraduate students.