How to Use the Question Formulation Technique Tomorrow

Renata Salas

One teaching method you can use tomorrow morning. [pauses] It's called the Question Formulation Technique, or QFT, and it completely flips the traditional classroom dynamic on its head. Instead of the teacher standing at the front of the room being the person who asks all the questions, the students are the ones doing the generating.

Colin Whitfield

Right, and this comes from an Edutopia article by Mike Lawrence and Lainie Rowell published back on August 3rd, 2021, called "Are Questions the Answer?" which itself builds on the foundational work of Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana. They wrote a book called *Make Just One Change* through the Right Question Institute. [matter-of-fact] But what I find fascinating here from a cognitive science perspective is that it shifts students from simple recall into active metacognition.

Renata Salas

Yes! [excited] They're not just scanning their brains for a pre-packaged answer to hand back to you. They are forced to actively notice what they *don't* know. It's that shift from "here is what I remember" to "here is the boundary of my understanding."

Colin Whitfield

And that boundary is key. [reflective] In cognitive psychology, we talk about the "information gap" perspective of curiosity. When a student has to write a question, their brain is doing a completely different cognitive task than when they're responding to a teacher's prompt. They have to identify the gap, define its edges, and articulate it. It's a form of elaboration that actually builds stronger neural retrieval paths because they've had to construct the intellectual frame themselves.

Renata Salas

Exactly. I think about my middle schoolers in Chicago. If I hand them a worksheet with five questions, they treat it like a search-and-rescue mission. [chuckles] They just want to find the words that match and get it over with. But when you ask them to build the questions, the ownership shifts instantly.

Colin Whitfield

Well, let's look at how you actually execute this in a lesson, because the design is beautifully simple. It starts with what Rothstein and Santana call a "QFocus," or Question Focus. Crucially, [measured] this prompt is *not* a question. It's a stimulus. The Edutopia piece mentions some brilliant examples, like using a chart, a photograph, or even a single provocative statement. My favorite was a one-liner about Welsh scientists discovering an unexpected effect of killer T-cells on cancer.

Renata Salas

Killer T-cells! [laughs] Talk about an instant hook for secondary students. If you write "Welsh scientists find killer T-cells destroy cancer" on the board, you don't even have to ask them to engage. They're already leaning in.

Colin Whitfield

Exactly. And once you have that QFocus, you set a strict five-minute timer and put four very specific rules on the board. One: ask as many questions as you can. Two: do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of them. Three: write down every question exactly as it's stated. And four: change any statements into questions.

Renata Salas

That second rule—no judging—is the absolute magic of the whole thing. [thoughtfully] In a typical classroom, a kid raises their hand, asks something, and they're scanning the room to see if their peers are smirking. But with a five-minute rapid-fire timer and a rule that says "no judging," that anxiety just evaporates.

Colin Whitfield

It creates a safe space for divergent thinking. But the intellectual heavy lifting actually happens *after* those five minutes are up, during the refinement step. This is where the students take their list of raw questions and label them as either "C" for closed-ended—questions that can be answered with a simple yes, no, or one word—or "O" for open-ended, which require explanation. Then, they have to select one closed question and actively convert it into an open one, and vice versa.

Renata Salas

I did this recently with my seventh graders using the opening line of Lois Lowry's *The Giver*. The line is: "It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened." That was our QFocus. One group had a closed question: "What month was it?" They changed it to an open one: "How does the approach of December change the mood of the community?" [warmly] Just watching them grapple with how changing the structure of a question completely changes the depth of the answer they'll get... it was incredible.

Colin Whitfield

That's brilliant. [chuckles] "What month was it" is a low-level retrieval task. "How does December change the mood" requires analysis. You've taught them how to scale the taxonomies of thinking themselves, rather than you dragging them up the ladder. And then they prioritize, right? They pick their top three, share one with the class, and suddenly you have the entire inquiry roadmap for your lesson, designed by the students.

Renata Salas

Yes, and that's the real tension of this routine. [reflective] It looks so simple on paper—it's just a five-minute brainstorm and a quick categorization. But the shift is massive because we rarely explicitly teach students *how* to ask questions. We just assume they know how. By giving them a structured method, we're handing them the keys to the intellectual drive of the classroom.

Colin Whitfield

Quite. It moves them from passive consumers of our curriculum to active architects of their own learning. And frankly, [dryly] it saves you from having to write a lesson hook ever again.

Renata Salas

[laughs] I will take any time-saver I can get, Colin. Give it a try tomorrow morning, everyone. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Colin Whitfield

Goodbye, everyone.