>> From the Library of Congress, in Washington, DC. >> Dan Rothstein is co-Director of the Right Question Institute and co-Author with Luz Santana of Make Just One Change, teach students to ask their own questions. A former community organizer, urban planner, and Fulbright Scholar, he has a BA from Harvard College and a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dan is currently working with the creators of the C-3 framework to integrate the question formulation technique into the inquiry arc. And I am going to mute myself and say, welcome Dan, we are glad to have you with us this evening. >> Well, welcome everybody. It's great to be with you. I'm excited and honored to be able to participate in this inaugural online conference. I'm going to give you a quick look at the question formulation technique and how teachers around the country at different levels have used it, have used it so their students can engage more effectively with primary sources. So I'm going to launch right into the process and we'll have some opportunities for you to participate and lots of opportunities to talk at the end. So, I just wanted to let you know that we do have a lot of materials available online on our educator network at RightQuestion.org. And of course, this one will be recorded, as you've seen before, and it will be on the Library of Congress website. Okay, we're going to look at question formulation as a foundational and transformative skill. We're going to look first at the development of the question formulation technique, how it developed. We began in 1990. My co-author, Lose Santana, and I and several other people were working on a dropout prevention program in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And we heard from parents. It was a low-income community. Parents weren't participating in the children's education. We heard from them that they weren't participating because they didn't even know what to ask. So we thought, okay, we can solve that problem. And of course, we did the wrong thing. We gave them a list of questions and realized that that only created more dependency on us to keep on coming up with the questions. So we went to work at figuring out how you teach what is really a very sophisticated skill, that very often is learned only through years of professional training and practice, to all people. And it was a long process of trial and error. Eventually, we came upon a process, the question formulation technique, that's been used in multiple fields. There's been research done on it and its application to family engagement. There's been a lot of work and researched done its use in healthcare with the National Institutes of Health Study showing the doubling and tripling of patient participation. And there's been a lot of interest in the private sector recently, thanks to Warner Burgers book, "A More Beautiful Question," where he featured our work as, if you want people to learn how to ask questions, here's an effective strategy for doing it. So it's been used in many places. And of course, it's been used in the classroom. When we published our book a few years ago, we didn't know quite what to expect. But what we've seen is an educator-led movement, teachers and educators at all levels, who have embraced the question formulation technique. More than 100,000 educators around the world are using it. And using it not that it's required or mandated in any setting, but because it addresses a problem that they recognize. And that's, you know, part of the reason why that they're using it is perhaps captured in these charts. You can see in this chart, a basic skill attainment, that shows a generally upward slope of reading skills and writing skills. And then if you look at this chart, you see the yellow line going down, and that's the slope of asking questions. And you see a sharp drop off from 4-year-olds going reaching the peak, and then a sharp drop-off after that. Now, part of the reason for that is because, as you all know, there's a lot of pressure to focus on answers, answers to tests and exams, getting the right answers. And certainly getting the right answers is a good goal, but there's also a role for the skill of question formulation and developing that skill in order to get to better answers. And I think that that's being recognized today because, for example, there's a strong movement towards inquiry-based learning, the Common Core state standards, Next-Generation of Science standards, college, and of course, the C-3 framework for social studies where they've done a great job at building inquiry right through the process. And we're excited now to be working with them and how to use the question formulation technique as part of that process. So we are looking at how to accelerate the movement from teacher questions to student questions. When students ask questions, their questions become a catalyst for greater curiosity, for engagement, for ownership, and for deeper learning. And so I'm going to give you a quick introduction now to how the question formulation technique does that. It basically helps accelerate the shift, in that one shift, from teachers asking questions of students to students asking their own questions. It distills some of the best pedagogical practices into a very simple teaching and learning process that makes it assessable for all teachers, novices and veterans alike. And it offers a shortcut to student engagement, ownership, and deeper learning. So any -- when the question formulation technique is used in the classroom, students learn to work with their questions, and that specifically means that they're producing their own questions, which is significant on its own. They're actually working with their questions to improve their questions. They strategize on how to use their questions. And as part of the process, they reflect on what they have learned and how they learned it. So now, let's take a look at the question formulation technique in practice, and give you an opportunity to ask some questions. So let's look at this set of rules that we've created for producing questions. There are 4 rules here. I want you to know that it took us about 8 years to create those 4 rules. Now, I'm sure you're all doing the math there and figuring that we've done 1/2 a rule a year. Actually, what we had to do is we had to figure out how not to create a list of a hundred rules on how to get students who were not accustomed to asking questions to actually start producing questions. And we tried to look at what's the simplest way to do that. And here are the 4 rules. Number 1, ask as many questions as you can. Two, do not stop to answer, judge, or discuss. Three, write down every question exactly as stated. And 4, change any statements into questions. Of course, we would like the first one, ask as many questions as you can, to be sufficient, but as you know, it's not. There's a need to create a structure and a safe space for doing that. So take a moment, look at those questions, and think about what might be difficult for you in following these rules. Which of the rules do you think might be most difficult for you to follow? So we're going to now take a look at an example, and you're going to get to use these rules and ask some questions. So I'm going to show you now what we call a question focus, which is meant to be the catalyst for student questions. So it's not a question from the teacher of the students, but rather it's a teacher designed selected focus for them to start asking questions. So here, take a look at this question focus. Take a moment there. That's the caning of sumner, and it may be familiar to you all. And it happened in the US Senate in 1856. So you're now going to get a chance to look at some student questions, but before you do that, what are some questions that you might ask about this question focus? Remember not to edit yourselves. Write down a few questions as quickly as you can. Okay, I would love for you to be able to keep on asking questions, but I'm going to take you through the whole process to take a look at it. And I seen in a lot of the questions in the chat that you'll enjoy seeing the sixth-graders' questions as I present them to you now. So this was a teacher here in the Boston, Massachusetts, area, teaching a unit on the Civil War. And she used the question focus and the question formulation technique as a pre-reading activity to engage the students. So now let's look at their questions. Why are they fighting? Are they fighting? Are they part of the government? Where were they? Very key question that they asking right up front there. What started the fight? Who are they? Were they signing anything? Who else was there? Why are you hitting him? Which, of course, is a great middle school question too. And then, why didn't they call 911? So that's one to enjoy there in the middle of this list. But look at the very next question. Was this related to slavery? And it moves all the way through to the end. Why are they smiling? And I notice from the chat that somebody asked a question about that as well. Somebody else asked a question about the end. So you'll see that you had questions that were similar to the questions that they were asking. I love number 15 as well. Who hit who first? Which is truly a great middle school question. So there you see what happens when students get a chance to produce their own questions following those rules. If you look at question number 18, why are they smiling, that's a detail that I certainly had missed. I know that some of you had not missed it. And it's a really interesting thing for them to be observing, that shows the level of engagement with the primary source of how carefully they are looking at it. So now, let's look at the next step in the question formulation technique. And that's where we have students think about open-ended questions and closed-ended questions. We use a simple definition of close-ended as being able to answer with a yes or no or a one-word answer. And open-ended questions requiring more explanation. And in the process, we would have students identify the questions as close-ended or open-ended. And it's always very interesting to see them do this work, find that there are some questions that are kind of in the gray area, they're not quite sure what to do. But they're becoming more sophisticated as they're actually working with their questions. And at that point, we asked them to think about, what are some of the advantages of close-ended questions. And that sometimes is a bit of a shock because they might've gotten the message that open-ended questions are better than close-ended questions, so they first start to have to think about, what are some advantages of a close-ended question. So as you think about that, what are some things that come to mind for you about some advantages to a close-ended question? Then we have them move on to look at disadvantages. What are some disadvantages of close-ended question? So in the advantages, they very often will talk about, it's quick, you get a quick answer, you can focus on the next question that you need to be asking. The disadvantages sometimes, it limits the information you're getting, it cuts off discussion. So then we have them move on to look at open-ended questions. And ask them to think about the advantages of open-ended questions. And they come up with comments that are -- would be familiar to you in terms of invites discussion, allows for further explanation, more exploration. And then when they think about disadvantages, they also identify some of the challenges. Sometimes you can get an answer that overwhelms you, that you don't quite know what to do with it, you're not clear about what the answer is. So they realize that there's advantages and disadvantages to both closed and open-ended questions. The important thing is to be able to ask different kinds of questions and to have the ability to take an open-ended question and change it to a closed to see if that helps you with your work, or vice versa, to take a closed and change it to an open. So let's look at how one class did this. So in taking the close-ended and changing it to open and taking an open-ended to a close, I bring you this example from Lexington, Massachusetts, Maureen Bennett, a third-grade teacher. And she was introducing unit on the Mayflower Compact. And the question focus was very simply, the Mayflower Compact. The students viewed the primary source on iPads. So take a look at it, that's the Mayflower Compact. The students were looking at it, and their job was to follow those rules that we introduced to you earlier and ask questions. So now, when I'm going to show you here, and this part is not -- we're not going to look at all their questions, we're just going to zero in on the ones that they changed from open to closed and closed to open, so you can see how that process works. So their student questions, look at number 5. Did the Indians sign it? And understood that that was a close-ended question, and they want to move it to an open-ended question. So they asked how many Indians signed it, which is very interesting thinking about trying to open that up. And again, they could see advantages and disadvantages, where they could see the advantages of getting a definitive answer to their first question. But it was good for them to practice changing the question, thinking about it some more. And the question right after that is, did the Pilgrims sign it? And then opening it up to, who signed it? Where they wanted to explore who might have signed it, maybe who didn't sign it, who was included in the signing. So it allowed them an opportunity to expand their horizons. And then their last question there, who is Lord James. And that got them thinking about text that they're reading in the compact, and they wanted to know was Lord James asking what is furtherance. So they were grappling with a very difficult text, asking questions about it, practicing changing their questions from closed to open and open to closed and discovering that they had more questions to ask. So now, let's take a look at the next step in the process of the question formulation technique. Prioritizing questions. So students have produced their questions, they've done some work on open and closed, they've changed them, they've identified them. And now we want students to be prioritizing. Prioritization instructions should be connected to your teaching and learning objectives and to your plan for using the student questions. So here are some examples of prioritization instructions that you could give. Choose 3 questions that you consider most important. That instruction gets them thinking about what's important to them. And that's a wide-open invitation. It is a very open-ended invitation for them to do thinking and for them to prioritize based on what interests them or they consider most important. Then there's a different kind of prioritization instructions where you're going to have them do research and you want them to start thinking about research questions. So you want them to choose 3 that will help them with their research. Then maybe in a different setting, you might want to use the question formulation technique for a specific reading assignment purpose. So you might give them the prioritization instruction of choose 3 questions that can be answered as you read. And as you look at the last one, you can give an instruction that, if you think about it, it's similar to what the Stanford History Education Group's reading, like a historian emphasizes about the importance of students thinking about the author's point of view. So you could give instructions that say choose 3 questions that will help you to explore the author's point of view. So it's a robust model that allows you with your teaching goals and specific content that you're teaching, specific objectives, for you to be able to get the students thinking on their own about the key issues. So let's look at an example of that prioritization. This is a eighth-grade classroom in a rural New Hampshire town, taught by Joshua Bier. And he had just done a unit on American imperialism. And so he's using the question formulation technique for summative assessment purposes. And if you think about that, you had just looked at 2 examples of teachers who were using it at the beginning of the unit. Here, Josh Bier is using it at the end of the unit. And here was his queue focus, that's what we call the question focus. It's very simple. Questions that should be asked about American imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. So they've just studied American imperialism at the turn of the 20 century, and he wants them to come up with a list of questions that can be used on the final exam. So their job is to come up with questions that should be asked about American imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. So let's take a look at what they did. They came up with a lot of questions. I'm just showing you here just one group's set of questions. They were working in small groups, there were different groups with different sets of questions. And this group chose as their 3 priority questions. Why did the Hawaiian natives in Quin not want the United States to annex Hawaii? So there you see the level of specificity and specific situation they wanted to know about, and they felt that that is a question that should be answered about American imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. Then you leap to question number 10. How does the Spanish-American war effect America? So there's a global question, a large question, with an understanding of policy implications and changes in society. And then you look at number 12, which actually didn't exist on the original list. It was originally question number 6. Which was, what was Alfred Their Mann's stance on imperialism? And they changed it to, why did Alfred Their Mann have the stance that he did on imperialism? So there you've got them working on the author's perspective on a significant influence on imperialism. And look at the very next question that they asked. Did Alfred Their Mann's book influence imperialism? So there you see they prioritized. And it's really interesting when you look at this example, that you can actually see this on our website, there is the full video of them using this in a classroom. I'm going to show you now a very quick trailer from that video so you can see them doing this work with the question formulation technique. >> What country developed the most? >> Why did the United States want to annex Hawaii? >> [inaudible] Panama Canal? >> The purpose is to get them thinking, to get them questioning what do I know about this subject. And the great thing about working in groups is that if you come up with a question, that may generate a whole new line of thinking for me, then I can add an additional question that may generate another line of thinking from somebody else. >> Who was the biggest anti-imperialist? >> [inaudible] All of these could go either way. >> Why is it so important for America to have overseas bases open? >> It covers a wide variety of what happened in the imperialistic era. >> You could ask one main question and then build questions off of that question and it makes me think more and you have to pull stuff out of your brain. And when you do that, you have to remember it again. And the more you take it out and remember it again, the deeper it gets into your brain and the more easier it is to remember. >> You never really know what you know about the subject until you see it from others and your own point of view. >> I think that's one of the great things about using the question formulation technique is, it's automatic engagement for the students, because they're interested in it, they get to view their voice, their opinions, their thoughts, and their questions. >> So I hope you enjoyed that trailer, and you can see the whole video on our website. So let's take a look at the next step of students sharing their work. They can share the questions that they change. They learn from each other about how they change the questions. They share their priority questions. And also they share the numbers of where in their sequence original questions did their priority questions fall. So it's very interesting when they see that, and I'll talk about that in a moment. And then they share their rationale for why they chose those priority questions. And they can discuss and share their next steps for working with their questions. So then they go through all that process. And at the very end, there is a piece, a part for reflection, where the students are asked, what did you learn? How did you learn it? And what do you understand differently now for you about students learning to ask their own questions? So that's a question that I have for you. What do you understand differently now about students learning to ask their own questions? Take a moment and think about that, and then I want to share with you some specific aspects of the why and how the QFT the question formulation technique works. Okay, let's take a look at some specific aspects of the process. We'll unpack the process and the outcomes. In the question formulation technique, there are actually 3 thinking abilities that are embedded into one process, and this is part of the rigor that is in the question formulation technique. They're doing rigorous thinking, rigorous work as they go through the different steps. And they're not all blended together, they are purposely separated so that they're able to work on each of these thinking abilities at a specific time. So let's look at the first one. The students begin to think in many different directions. They do divergent thinking. So the 4 rules that we came up with, that we told you took us 8 years to come up with them , are really trying to create that space and the structure and the rigor for them to do more than, I've got one question and no more. And I'm sure many of you have seen this, many teachers have talked about trying to invite questions and get questions from students can feel like pulling teeth. Or they'll get questions from 1 or 2 or 3 students, but they'll not hear from other students. So the idea of using those rules is to create the structure for students to do divergent thinking. It's hard to do divergent thinking if you don't have a process and a structure for doing that. Then they move to a different kind of thinking, narrowing down and focusing, they begin to do convergent thinking. And they do convergent thinking as they begin to look at their open and closed-ended questions. They begin to practice changing them. They are looking more carefully, more closely at their questions. And then they prioritize their questions. And when they're prioritizing their questions, they are continuing with the kind of sophisticated convergent thinking that should come after divergent thinking. So there's a sequence here. Now there's one more thinking ability, that's a very sophisticated thinking ability that's built into the question formulation technique. And it's thinking about thinking, metacognitive thinking. And there are several steps in that process that students are thinking about their thinking. Beginning with when they're asked, what might be different about following the 4 rules for producing questions. They have to think about how do they usually operate, and what's different about it, what are the rules require of them in their thinking and working process. They have to think about advantages and disadvantages of open and closed-ended questions. They have to think about why they chose their priority questions, what's their rationale for that. And then, even when they see the sequence of questions, very often they notice they might have a priority question from the first grouping, something from the middle, something from the end. And they realize that one of their priority questions didn't come until the end. And so they got to see the value of working with their questions to advance their own thinking. So what happens, what do the teachers see when students go through this process? They see students who are more curious and engaged. We take greater ownership and are more confident working with primary sources. Which, instead of it being intimidating, unfamiliar, and difficult, it becomes something that they are looking at very, very carefully, and they have their own set of questions now to look at that. And what do students say? Students say many different things about how they are learning this process. Here's a sixth grader in Palo Alto, California, who said, just when you think you know all you need to know, you ask another question and discover how much more there is to learn. And then think about this statement from a high school student in Boston, who said, when you ask the question, you feel like it's your job to get the answer. Just think about that, think about the feeling for you, think about the feeling for that student. It's not their job to give you the answer to your question, they've set a learning agenda, they feel like it's their job to get the answer. And look at this one last student reflection. This is a ninth grade student who was in a remedial summer school program at risk of being held back. And when asked what he had learned by learning to ask his own questions in the summer school program, said, the way it made me feel was smart, because I was asking good questions and giving good answers. So if you think back to those charts at the beginning of this presentation, and you think about what we talked about in terms of the pressure to get to answers, the students discover that by learning to ask good questions, by learning to ask their own questions, by working with their own questions, they can get to good answers. And that adjective that he used to describe himself, smart, is a very significant one for a student who was in the summer school program that he was in. So those are the kinds of changes that you see in students. Here's a reflection from a teacher. This is the third grade teacher, Maureen Bennet, in Lexington, Massachusetts, who said, the question formulation technique was a great segueway into the unit. I noticed that the students were fully engaged and excited to try to figure out what this document was all about. Having them generate their own questions about this made the lesson so much more powerful than ever before. So let's take a final look at the question formulation technique and its universal relevance across disciplines, grade levels, subject areas, and communities. So the research confirms the importance of student questioning. John Haddi talks about self-questioning as the metacognitive strategy, that students formulating their own questions prove to be one the most effective metacognitive strategies. Engaging in pre-lesson self-questioning improves student's rate of learning by nearly 50%. And here's this wonderful quote from the historian David Hackett Fischer. We talked about how questions are the engines of intellect, the cerebral machines which convert energy to motion, and curiosity to control inquiry. He wrote this way back in 1971. And I love how it captures what students are now doing all around the country and all around the world as they're converting that energy into motion, into action, into a research agenda. They're converting that curiosity to a very disciplined rigorous controlled inquiry. So I love how that quote in a sense anticipates much of what we're now seeing all students being able to do on their own. Now, let's take a moment and look at the importance of students working with their own questions. So there's a little note there about at the bottom, this was a subliminal message that I'm making explicit now. This was a photo shot that I used at the beginning of the process of the question formulation technique, and you see a student there with marker in hand, writing and working. Another student looking at the list and pointing, making discussions. You can see where they've marked some questions with an O for open. So you see that kind of work, it's students working with their own questions. And when they do that, it becomes a transformative skill. We believe it's a foundational skill that should be taught to all students, and it is also a transformative skill. Allow students to go from confusion to a clear learning agenda. It allows them to move towards better answers. It increases engagement and ownership, and allows for genuine inquiry in the classroom. And not to be forgotten is what teachers report, is that it provides a little more joy in a very demanding profession. When you see your students really excited about their own questions and their learning agenda. And then is one more reason for us to think about the importance of teaching the skill question formulation. Democracy. The woman seated in the center of the picture there, seated at the table there, is Septima Clark, one of the great educators of the 20th century, great relatively unknown educators of the 20th century. Who in 1955, was fired by the Charleston, South Carolina Board of Education after 18 years of teaching because she was a member of the NAACP. So she and her cousin, Bernice Robinson, who is standing behind her there, organized citizenship schools, in which they organized to teach adults in the community basic literacy skills so they could learn to help themselves, not get cheated out of wages, and begin to prepare for a larger agenda of participating in democracy. And that's really the opportunity that we all have when we're sharing and teaching the skill question formulation, is we're building civic capacity through a foundational democratic skill. It's possible to imagine a dictatorship without questions, without citizens being able to ask questions. But it's not possible to imagine a democracy without questions. And so we are delighted to share the question formulation technique. Delighted the opportunity we've had to work with teaching primary sources at the Library of Congress with our partners at C3 and the social studies framework, to be working with teachers and educators in all areas to help build this fundamental learning skill, this fundamental thinking skill, a fundamental life skill, and a fundamental democratic skill. So thank you all very much, and I look forward to our discussion. Keep in mind Septima Clark's words, we need to be taught to study rather than to believe, to inquire rather than to affirm. And I want to thank Josh Bier and his class, at the Goshen-Lempster School in New Hampshire. You can see an educational leadership article that has more about his work and teachers in other parts of the country, and you can access the full video that was previewed here. And thank you to our team here at the Right Question Institute who helped make this session possible. And as I mentioned earlier, there are more resources available on the question formulation technique at the RightQuestion.org. So I look forward to your questions and the discussion. >> Fantastic, Dan. This is Cheryl again. I've been harvesting questions. And the first one has to do with how teachers manage the time that this technique might take. >> Okay, that's a common question and a concern. The very first time that you use the question formulation technique, it is something where you actually are having the students discuss the rules, think about them, discuss advantages and disadvantages. So if you give them -- you can do this in 35, 40 minutes. You can do this in a class in one class hour, depending on how much time you want to give them doing work in small groups. But once they learn this, it becomes something that becomes part of second nature for them. They know they're able to do this quickly. You can get it done in 10 minutes. You can get it done as a do now at the beginning of a class, where you present a question focus and the students at the beginning are actually generating their own questions. You can do it as a homework assignment. Students learn how to do this on their own. So you are developing the skill, you're giving them different opportunities to continue to practice the skill. And like any skill, it's something that you get better at the more you practice, and you can do it more quickly. So yes, there is a commitment the very first time did you do it, but then you modify it so that you don't have full discussions of all the different aspects of the process, and they just get to work on asking their questions, changing them, prioritizing, and planning on next steps what they're going to do. >> Thank you, that's a really helpful answer. Along the same lines, somebody asked how she can meet her goals when the students are forming the questions. What are your experiences around that, please? >> Right, that's also very important to address. Which is, we weren't able to fully get into this year. But when you design the question focus, you're designing it with the content that you need to teach in mind. When you are designing the prioritization instructions, you're doing it with the teaching and learning goals that you have in mind, including the specific things the students will be doing. So that's why if you think about the teachers chose a question focus that was related to what they needed to teach, what needed to be covered. When they chose their prioritization instructions, it was based on what do they now want students after they've done this thinking about this topic, what do we want to be zeroing in on to be prioritizing so that when they move into the next steps, it's going to be connected to what I'm teaching and learning. So it's not disconnected from that, it's actually shaped by what you need to teach. >> Terrific. So along the same lines, Dan, I'm wondering what you've encountered in terms of teachers regarding this is a shift in practice, and particularly, I've been wondering how it differs from other approaches to student questioning where teachers might provide question stems and really shape that more carefully. This technique seems much more open. >> Right, well, it's very interesting. This is a deceptively simple technique, and it's also deceptively open. Because there's actually a very rigorous structure here that you work with that structure, in a sense, there's the art and the science of the question formulation technique. Not saying that we discuss at length in our book make just one change, but the shorthand version of it here is that you are able to basically take what you need to cover, and you design it in a way so that they're able to zero in on the on the key topics and on what they need to be thinking about. So I'm not sure if that answered your question. >> It certainly gives me lots to think about, and I'm going to turn this out to the participants and say, if you have questions around this, go ahead and put them in the chat box and we'll catch as many as we can. So, Dan, how widely has this technique been implemented if I'm not necessarily looking for an exact number, but how widely is it being used? And did you have any surprises when you took it into a school or a district? >> Well, I think that we've been inspired by just seeing how teachers have been hungry for this, this is the dream of many teachers to see their students working with questions, asking questions, engaged, taking ownership. So it's been a very exciting process. I have to share with you all a little kind of secret. That when we were asked to write the book because there were some examples of teachers using it, we barely had 5 stories, full stories, of teachers around the country using the question formulation technique in the classroom, and one of whom was my daughter, who was in her first year of teaching in New York City. So maybe that invalidated the pool even further, I'm not sure, although some people say that might've actually validated the technique even more, don't know about that. But we were able to put the stories together and illustrate how do you use the question formulation technique, and since then, it's been an educator-driven movement. And that's what's really been one surprising and wonderful. And we've seen the kind of initiative that's been taken by people who pick up on this and find ways to bring this in. So with teaching of primary sources, you have Mary Johnson's work, who tweeted about this, and we connected through twitter. And the next thing we know, we were doing work with the Western region of teaching the primary sources. And since then, they've brought it to more people within your network and around the country. And that's what we see community after community. And what's also really exciting is that it's being used across all kinds of communities, urban, suburban, rural, elementary, middle, high school, and higher ed. I just came back from a meeting today at Harvard Medical School, where I gave a keynote address last year on the art and science of asking better questions. And there's a recognition at the medical school that their students are very good at answering questions, but they need to get better at asking their own questions. So there's just a lot of excitement among educators that inspires us to keep moving. >> Sounds like this has huge ramifications, and I'm seeing a lot of excitement in the chat too. One of the questions that just came in, and Andrew nodded toward it in the chat, but maybe you can expand on this just a little bit. And we we're running close on time, so we'll see if we get any questions past this. Do you have any research or examples of kindergartners or first-graders using this technique? >> yes. And there are some wonderful examples of teachers using it. And actually, on our blog post, which I think our blog, which Andrew just mentioned in the chat, there are examples of a first-grade teacher who wrote about using the question formulation technique in his class with examples of that. There are teachers around the country who are doing that who are tweeting about it. So there are a lot of examples of that. >> I will get that link to the blog out. We're working on that. So we want to move into the wrapping up pieces. Thanks, Andrew, for putting that link to the blog. We want to thank everybody for joining us. We will be in communication via email within 5 business days with directions on how to access your certificate. I want to thank you all so much for participating, for joining, for your energy, your enthusiasm, your questions. And we are going to end the recording and the session now. Thank you so much. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.