Question Formulation Technique
I just learned about this questioning approach in today’s session with K White, and I’d like to recap it in this blog.
One of the most valuable skills for lifelong learning is the ability to ask questions.
The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) is one of many methods for improving a question. Right Question Institute created it to assist people with creating, working with, and using their own questions.
There are several steps in QFT process:
1. Define Question Focus
It is a bootstrap focus for making questions. It may be topic, question, or anything that can make questions flow.
The good question focus should be simple and clear, and encourage divergent thinking.
2. Introduce the rules
Next, we introduce the rules to colleagues. There are 4 rules for make questions:
- Ask as many questions as you can.
- Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer the questions.
- Write down every question exactly as it is stated.
- Change any statement into a question.
We must generate as many questions as possible in this process. Don’t pass any kind of judgment on any of the questions.
3. Improve Your Questions
You can improve your questions by using these 2 step:
- Mark your questions as Open-ended or Closed questions
- Change questions from open-ended to closed-ended
- Change questions from closed-ended to open-ended
The open-ended question is a question that require longer explanation, while the closed question is a question that can be answered with “yes” or “no” or a few words.
After finishing this step, you should have more questions
4. Prioritizes
In this step, you have to get back to the main objective. You have to prioritizes all of your question in order to pick the question the relate to the objective. You can pick them as many as you want.
For example, you can make the instruction like this: “Choose three questions that …”
- You consider most important
- Will help with your research
- Can be used for your experiment
- Will guide your reading/writing
- Can be answered as you read
- Will help you solve the problem
The rational of selecting question is as important as the question itself. Participants should share their thought on why they select that question.
5. Actions Plan and Next step
Now we will show them how the questions are used.
We can move from questions to action steps.
For example, In order to answer the priority questions:
- What do you need to know ? → Information
- What do you need to do? → Tasks
After that you can share your actions to each other.
6. Reflect
This step help people to think how they use questions to learn.
Questions can be:
- What did you learn?
- How can you use what you learn?
You will see an overview of how the QFT mechanism works.
QFT, in my view, is really interesting, particularly for someone like me who has never studied how to create a question.
This approach will help you improve your questioning skills and get a deeper understanding of how others think.