>> Good afternoon everyone. My name is Cathy Mcguigan from the Library of Congress, and I want to welcome you to a very special program today. This is a professional development educator webinar from the Library of Congress, and today we are talking -- we are looking at an introduction to the question formulation technique for primary source learning. So now, on to today's program. As I mentioned before, it's an introduction to the question formulation technique for primary source learning. Question formulations is a fundamental skill for thinking, learning, and effectively participating in democracy. This webinar introduces educators to the question formulation technique, QST, a strategy first developed in 1990. The evidence-based QST is now used around the world by over 400,000 educators in diverse communities to foster inclusion and to teach students how to become inquiry driven learners. Today, you're going to learn through viewing. This introductory session is designed especially for educators and learners who are new to the QST. The session is being facilitated by the Right Question Institutes Director of Professional Learning, Sarah Westbrook and Andrew P. Minigan, RQI's Director of Strategy. Participants will leave ready to immediately use a powerful, simple strategy to facilitate student inquiry on primary sources. So without further ado, I will hand things over to our first speaker, Sarah Westbrook. >> Hi everyone and welcome. Thank you all for joining us and spending some time with us this afternoon. I'm joined by Andrew Minigan who is my close colleague here are the Right Question Institute. I'm the director of professional learning at the Right Question Institute, but my background is teaching high school English in the Boston area, and now I work with educators around the country to design professional learning and also to learn from what they're doing in their classrooms and try to share back out with all of you some of their creativity and the best practices that they've hit on. Andrew, do you want to introduce yourself? >> Everyone. My name is Andrew Minigan. As Sarah mentioned, I work at the Right Question Institute. I currently lead some NSF funded research products on exploring how to teach researchers how to ask better more transformative research questions. Thinking of learning with researchers all around the country as well. >> So, we're so happy to be here with you. Thank you for being here. We're going to put you to work very quickly, and so, you might want to have a piece of paper or another screen available to you in the next 10 minutes or so. There are two icons that you might see pop up on the screen today. The first one, the thinking bubble means that we're asking you to do some individual work and you're not sharing anything at that point. When you see the chat box icon pop up, that means we're asking you to share some of your work with everybody else in the chat box. So look for those two icons. It's been really wonderful to see who is in the room. We wish that we could be in a physical room together, but we're delighted to be in this virtual space. So if you haven't introduced yourself yet I would love to see just your name and where you're joining from in the chat box, but it's been awesome to see people from Virginia, California, Massachusetts, Brooklyn. It's wonderful. So thank you to everybody and continue to introduce yourself if you haven't had a chance yet. I see Florida, lots of California. But welcome to all. So today, we're spending a little bit of time thinking about why the skills question formulation is so essential. We're learning through doing and we're going to have a collaborative activity where we're all working on a problem together. We'll look at a couple of real classroom examples and applications including virtual classroom examples, and then we'll close by thinking about question formulation right now. We are tweeting. Andrew is frankly a much more dedicated tweeter than I am, so if you want to send us some love that way that would be great, and it's also a great chance to connect with the larger community of people in our network who are all using the question formulation technique. All of our materials are open and free for educators. You can find all of it on our website. The only thing that we ask is if you source us as the source of the question formulation technique and really we want people to go off and use the resources. You do not need to ask us for permission. So, let's spend a little bit of time before we get down to work thinking about why this work is so important for students. >> Thank you Sarah. So we'd like to share a little bit about the origins of our work, how the work of the Right Question Institute started. The work of the Right Question Institute didn't start in a think tank nor did it start in the academy. Rather the work of the Right Question Institute began in Lawrence, Massachusetts. A low-income city, former [inaudible] of textile city just outside of Boston. It was parents whose children were in a dropout prevention program who were the original source of inspiration [inaudible] remained a barrier to their participating in their children's education which was we don't go to the school because we don't even know what to ask. So these parents working with our QI cofounders and co-directors Dan Rothstein, Luz Santana, as well as the late Agnes Bain, who named this initial barrier. And Dan, Luz, and Agnes did what maybe anyone would have done. They came up with lists of questions for these parents to use and ask at parent teacher meetings, and they did that about one or 2000 times before they realized that what they were doing was cultivating a dependency on them for the questions. What the parents really needed was the opportunity for themselves to learn and hone this really fundamental skill for thinking, learning, and for advocating. Academics and thought leaders also agree. David Hackett Fischer, Professor Emeritus at Brandis University believes that there can be no thinking without questioning, no purposeful study of the past nor any serious planning for the future. Laura Bush, an educator herself as well as a former first lady, believes that, "Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers," and the wonderful thing is that once the child learns to use a library the doors to learning are always open. This is a wonderfully pithy book written by a former chairman of the department of biology at Columbia University. It's a book on ignorance. Stuart Firestein also wrote a book on failure. He teaches courses on ignorance and failure at Columbia University which puts those ivy league students in quite the predicament of whether they want to excel at failure or not, but I digress. He wrote this book on how he was teaching med students at Columbia, and they were coming into class believing all they needed to know was what was in the textbook. What Stuart shares with his students is, "No, that's all we know now." What we don't know is much greater. And his job as a professor is to teach them how to navigate this unknown, and he concludes his book with this thought, "We must teach students how to think and question." In other words, how to manage their ignorance. College presidents agree. Peter Salovey, president of Yale University in a speech to incoming students this past fall, [inaudible] we're here to ask questions. Questions about one another and about the world around us. We are at Yale to nurture a culture of curiosity. I love that idea of an entire campus of empathetic question asking students and learners. Nancy Cantor in the New York Times interview at the turn of the 21st century believed that the best we can do for students is to have them ask the right questions. And yet, if you look at the research, only about 27% of college graduates believe that they've actually learned how to ask their own questions during their time in undergrad, and the problem begins long before that. Of course, for those of you with young children at home, you are familiar with some of these statistics. You might actually think they're on the conservative side. Researchers found young children ask about 10,000 questions per year before they begin formal schooling only about half of which are why, why, why? The point is they are agents of curiosity. And yet by the time that they're adolescents, who's asking questions in the classroom? Researchers found that educators are asking about two questions per minute and students only about two questions per hour. And not only are there disparities and differences between the amount of questions educators are asking compared to students, but researchers also found that higher achieving students ask more questions than moderate and lower achieving students, and students from higher income backgrounds and families ask more questions than students from moderate and lower income families. So disparities and differences between educators and students but also between different students as well. It's not for lack of trying or wanting. Teachers report that it feels like pulling teeth to get students to ask questions and researchers found that they only ask about 1/5th the amount of questions that they would deem desirable, that they want them to be asking that many questions. So, how can we move from this palpable, horrible feeling of pulling teeth to the feeling of excitement that comes with teaching students how to become more curious as question asking learners? But we have to move from this theme. The exception this is a seminal study in question formulation. Of course, this is examining educators questions and it found that there was only one classroom out of 100 that was observed where students were asking questions and the result was that the lesson developed an impetus born of real interest. So over 100 years ago, this researcher found that when students are asking questions, there's engagement. There is interest. So we have to move from that being one out of 100 to it being 100 out of 100 classrooms, and that's what we've been doing in our work for the past about nine years with the publication of "Make Just One Change" to teach students how to ask their own questions. Sarah, next slide. Moving into the norm where now there are over one million classrooms where students are learning how to ask their own questions, drive their own learning. It's really been a field-driven movement where educators are taking this people strategy and developing and advancing it in really ingenious creative ways. So what happens when students begin to learn how to ask their own questions? John Hattie and his famed meta-analysis found that student formulation to their own questions is one of the most effective meta-cognitive strategies and that pre-lesson self-questioning actually improved student's rate of learning by nearly 50%. What the students have to say, well in one summer remedial class in Boston, Massachusetts, a student found that after they learned how to ask questions, "The way it made me feel smart because I was asking good questions and getting good answers." Now smart might not be a word that student typically used to describe themself, but after he asked questions and learned the power of his being able to drive his own learning. The student at Brandis University, the QFT question formulation technique really teaches a way of thinking. So students can be thinking critically every time they read that piece of information literacy. Trying to connect the concepts and deciding whether to take facts and information at face value or to dig a little deeper. So that is enough for me. Sarah is about to put you to work in an experience in the QFT. >> Okay. Hi everyone. So thank you so much Andrew. We are about to start some collaborative work together, and I warned you that you're going to need either a piece of paper or another device somewhere that you can use to write down some questions, that you could do a little bit of work. So I'll give you a second right now. Just get those things in front of you, and we're going to do some work today on the problem that Andrew was just naming for us. So the question formulation technique in a nutshell, the process that you're about to go through is that individuals learn to produce their own questions, improve their questions, strategize on how to use them, and then reflect on what they've learned and how they've learned it. There are four rules for this process. There's ask as many questions as you can, do not stop to answer, judge, or discuss, write down every question exactly as stated, or in this case, exactly as it first comes to mind, and then change any statements into questions. So if a statement pops into your head, just go ahead and try to formulate it as a question, and try not to judge yourself as you're asking questions. So I just want to give you a few seconds right now. Think for yourself what would be difficult for you in following these four rules? So just think about it. Andrew, what do you normally hear people say is difficult? >> I find that people often believe it's going to be difficult not to judge themselves when it's collaborative judge themselves and others, and that's really a big shift in their behavior and this rule helps them hold themselves accountable for that. >> It is very difficult for me not to judge myself so I relate. So in a minute, you're going to be asking questions about a topic that I'm going to give you. You're following the rules. You're now all officially deputized in the rules, and so, you have to do your best. Hold yourself to them and then please number your questions, and we'll talk about that later. So, I'm going to set a timer. Let's see what we can do in about three minutes. I'll put the topic up on the screen. You're going to ask as many questions as you can on your own paper. You're not sharing anything just yet. You don't actually need to observe this time. So you're just asking questions about the statement on your screen. Some students are not asking questions about primary sources. You'll hear it. It'll be very quiet. I'm going to set the timer. I'll give you a time check. Just ask as many questions as you can on your own paper starting now. So get down your last couple of words, last couple of facts, and I'm moving us into the next phase of the question formulation technique process. So there are a lot of ways that you can define questions. For our purposes, there are just two categories. Close-ended questions, which are questions that can be answered with a yes, no, or a one word answer. Open-ended questions are questions that require more explanation. So I'd like us to take a look at your own list of questions and let's see, I'm going to see if we can do it in under a minute. I think we can. I'd like you to try to identify your questions as either a C for close-ended or an O for open-ended. So let's take about 30 seconds right now. See if you can identify your questions as closed or open-ended. All right. So, it's okay if you didn't identify all of your questions as long as you have a couple marked. We're going to move on. So, there are some advantages and disadvantages to the types of questions that you asked. So I'm curious to hear from you all, what do you see as advantages of close-ended questions? And you can go ahead and drop a few thoughts in the chat box if you'd like to share. So any advantages you see about asking close-ended questions. I see easier to respond, quick to assess. Close-ended questions offer immediate response and helps scaffolding. Fast, solidify understanding, necessary facts. Simple, clarifying, typically facts. More participation. Cover basic information. Students feel successful, can build off close-ended questions. Narrowing focus. Easy for quiet students. Access point to deeper levels of inquiry. Thank you all. If we could shift to some -- let's look at some disadvantages now. So the disadvantages you see of close-ended questions. Any disadvantages? I see nothing to discuss, limited access points, too simple, too narrow. No deeper thought. Too simplistic often. Not thought-provoking. Further research limited. Don't encompass the reality of the student situation. Limit the conversation. Closes off divergent thinking. Not engaging. Don't get easy answers. Thank you all. So if we shift to thinking about open-ended questions, go ahead and share in the chat box anything you see about open-ended questions. The advantages of open-ended questions. Thought provoking. Leads to discovery. Hooks students. Engages the learner. Details. Multiple ideas and discussion. Takes longer to answer. Right I don't know if I saw that or not. Opportunities. Okay. Creative thinking. So there's lots of advantages. All right, what about the disadvantages? Disadvantages of open-ended questions? What do you see as the disadvantages to some of the open-ended questions? I see time consuming, can get off track or off topic. Time. Nobody knows the answers. Kids can get lost going down the rabbit hole forever. Can be confusing. Can be open to misinterpretation. Frustrated. Students space out when others talk, harder for some learners. Controversial. Can confuse the point to students. Overwhelming for ELL. Some students may simply skip them. Time constraints. Yes, thank you all so much for those insights. There are advantages and disadvantages to both types of questions and both close-ended and open-ended questions can be good and right depending on what the context and the situation is. So close-ended questions can be really strategic questions when you're trying to build up to an idea or drill down into an idea or hold someone accountable. So because both types of questions have advantages and disadvantages, I'd like to give us an opportunity in this next step to think about changing one or two of your questions strategically. So I'm going to ask you to take a close-ended question and change it to make it an open-ended question and then take one open-ended question and change it into a close-ended question, and you'll add those questions as new questions at the bottom of your list. So if you had 10 questions you'll now have 12. The other thing I'd like to invite you to do is think about changing questions strategically. So, is there a question that you think might be more effective as a closed-ended question? Is there a question you wish you'd asked in a more open way? So, don't change the questions that are easiest to change. So I'm going to give us one minute to accomplish this, and your time starts now. So let's move onto the next step of the process. Try to get down those last couple words or phrases. So we've produced questions. We've thought about open and closed. We've transformed the language of a few questions. I'm asking you now to prioritize. So again, I think that I might have had quarantine fever while I was writing these slides. So I'm asking you to think about the Q focus that we actually looked at which was the statement from students are not asking questions about primary sources. So I want you to prioritize with that Q focus or that prompt in mind. So think about why you choose those questions. I'm going to give you a minute. You're thinking about the three questions that you are most interested to discuss and think about further. You're thinking about the original Q focus. Some students are not asking questions about primary sources, and then you're going to think through your rationale why you chose those. So let's take one minute. Your time starts now. Hopefully, you have three questions or at least a couple of questions. So we're going to move on. Could everybody, when you have one ready, could you share just one of your priority questions in the chat box? So, any one of your priority questions, go ahead and share that in the chat box now. Maybe Andrew can help me read some of these out. It's really fantastic to see all of these questions. >> So, how do I have the students use the questions they are creating? Oh, why aren't they asking questions? It's tough to keep up with this faster than chat box. How does the environment impact this? What primary sources do students use? What kind of technology might be useful to help those kids who are afraid to speak up in front of the whole class? How do we encourage active interest? Do students feel they're in a safe space? >> I thank you all so much for those questions. So we're moving into the next step here, and I'd like you to think about your -- whatever you said your three priority questions were. So to move from having that question and sitting with that question into taking some action on it, how would you go about doing that? What are a couple of ideas you have for the information you might need to know to answer one of your priority questions or some of the tasks or actions that you would take in order to get that information? So for now, I'd like everybody just think about a priority question or two that you had, and a couple of ideas for how you might go about getting information or taking action on that question. I'm going to give us a minute and a half. I would say a generous minute and a half. It's great. I see that there are some ideas of some action steps already in the chat box. So I'm just going to go ahead and move us all there. So feel free to share an idea you had about some next steps you might take. And also invite everybody to share the numbers of your three priority questions and their placement in your original sequence. So what I mean by that is my priority questions might be two, four, and seven out of 10 total. Andrew, do you mind helping with the chat box again? >> Yes. Of course. >> And again, if you all can post the numbers of your priority questions out of how many total? >> Sorry Sarah. >> Oh, that's okay. I was just going to say if you guys keep an eye on what you notice about those numbers, if there's any patterns that come up. Go ahead Andrew. >> So being one, two, and four out of eight. One, five, and seven out of seven. Three, six, nine out of nine. One, six, eight out of 12. One, four, three, and six, out of six. Six, 10 and 15 out of 20. Two, six, 12 out of 13. And one, two, six out of 10. Keep that coming if you haven't already typed that into the chat box, please share. >> And I'm curious to hear if anyone, is there anything you are noticing about the sequences or the numbers that you're seeing? If you're too early and one's late. Usually one out of the first three. They occur later in the process. Early, middle, late. The top questions tended to get additional attention. One is usually there. The more we question the better they get. Even, odd, odd, even. Yes, it's really interesting to pay attention to the sequence because it's not always the same, and sometimes it depends on what Q focus or prompt you use. So we often see a beginning, middle, and end pattern, and I really don't know why that is. So if you have some ideas please let me know, but it can be revelatory for students to point out that a really important question only came three or four minutes into questioning and you only got there because you asked 10 questions originally. So let's move on. It sounds like a lot of you have some ideas about why that sequence might be. It's very interesting. So I'd like us to just take a minute and reflect on what did you learn and how did you learn it? So if we could take a minute sort of silently and individually and then share something that came to you. So anything that you learned and how did you learn it? Let's think for a quiet minute. Go ahead and start sharing your reflections in the chat box when you're ready. All right, Andrew, we're relying on you to read the chat box. >> Great. So the transforming the closed, oh it's tough to read here. There's a structure process to teaching how to ask questions. It doesn't just "happen." They learned how to generate questions quickly and prioritize them. We'll need to give students time to think. This is not something they are used to doing. I have learned three minutes feels like a long time. You should come to Thanksgiving dinner at my house. Changed mindset. Questions don't just happen. They require crafting. Quantity versus quality. Reflection and group collaboration prompt from the instructor. It's hard not to judge your questions. Thank you. Going over which questions were most important to me was very helpful. Students can learn to be strategic about asking questions. Yes, more in-depth questions. Learn about taking time to think of the answers. Give the students time to think of the answers. Chunking student bias. >> Thank you so much for all of your reflections and all of your participation. I'm just going to come back to the idea of questioning for a minute. One thing I think is really important is that we didn't tell you, you must ask 10 questions, for instance. And the reason for that is that when you say 10 questions, that the really important priority question is 11 or 12, you may never get there. And I also think that some students might not get to 10 questions the first time they try questioning because it is challenging. You're asking them to do school in a way that's very different from the way they might be used to. So it's really interesting to think intentionally about how you're planning and structuring this questioning time. But we really appreciate all of your participation. I have to go back at the end of this hour and read that chat box at my leisure because I have a tough time seeing all of it right now. So we're going to share briefly how this process works and the types of thinking that you're doing, and then we'll take a look at some real classroom examples from around the country. >> Thank you Sarah, and we're going to move pretty quickly here sharing you a little bit about how and why this strategy works. So this is a slide that shows the QFT. It's so simple. It fits on one slide. And here, you can review, again, the elements of the strategy and the different steps that Sarah just facilitated for you all. >> I do think it's worth noting there it would be nice if we only needed the very first rule, ask as many questions as you can. But we all know that that's not quite enough to give every student the opportunity in this space to ask, so the rest of the four rules really protect the safety of the process. >> So while you were going through those different steps, you were developing three discrete thinking abilities with one process. Thinking abilities are really powerful on their own but when developed in concert, they're even more robust and powerful. So as you were asking as many questions as you could without stopping to edit yourself, you were thinking divergently. You were thinking in many different directions as you let those questions flow. This is a thinking ability often associated with creativity. Then at different points in the process you were thinking more convergently, strategically. You were thinking about how it might be advantageous to reorder questions to better elicit the types of information you would like to seek. You were asked to prioritize different questions and you were also asked to develop an action plan. Something that you can move on and move from thinking into action. So you were moving from that thinking into strategy. And throughout the entire process you were thinking meta-cognitively. You were thinking about your thinking. You were asked to reflect on what might be challenging about following the different rules. You were asked to think about the advantages and disadvantages of different types of questions, your rationale, and you were also asked to reflect on the process at the close. So throughout the entire process you were thinking meta-cognitively. Sarah and I are just going to share just a few quick examples just so you can get a sense of what this looks like when it's applied in the classroom context. And as Sarah mentioned, this is really just the tip of the iceberg. A lot more resources available on rightquestion.org as well. So definitely check those out and those videos. This is an example from an 11th grade classroom, an 11th grade US history classroom in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Kelly [inaudible] was ending a unit on World War II and she wanted to use a primary source to lead into an informed debate about whether the US was justified or not in its use of atomic weapons towards the end of the world war. So this is the primary source that Kelly shared with her students. An image of the second drawing of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. An image from the Library of Congress, and here are some of the questions students asked. What is this? Who did this? What were the environmental and economic implications of dropping the bomb? Is that a plane wing in the bottom right? Who was responsible for dropping the bomb? What led to this event? The question of cause. And what happened as a result of dropping the bomb? Effects. Where was the bomb dropped? Had people been given warning? When did this happen? How long did it take to notice effects of the bombs and how many lives were lost as a result? So you can see the real breadth of questions here. Students asking about questions of topics really nuanced observational questions that they're observing from the image itself, as well as questions related to cause and effect that led really seamlessly into the next steps of the QFT on how the students were using the questions. So, students choose their own priority questions to respond to as a part of the homework assignment in Google Classroom, and then there was a debate on whether the US was justified in its dropping of the atomic bomb and students had already done all the rigorous thinking on different perspectives, and so, they were really well prepared and engaged in this exercise because they already dived into this primary source. >> Thank you Andrew. So we wanted to share with you an example from the past month. This was a virtual example completed completely asynchronously with students. This is the reality we're all living in right now. So this is a fourth grade teacher from Nevada and she was introducing the Hoover Dam to students. She used a variety of different tools but primarily Google Forms. So this was her primary source Q focus, and again, the Q focus is the prompt that you're giving students and it can be almost anything. In this case, it would be a primary source, but it could also be a phrase, an audio clip, a video clip, an experiment. It's just not a teacher question is the key point. So she also used [inaudible] to zoom in and zoom out on different parts of the primary source which I know is a great practice that I've heard several of our friends at the library recommend. And they asked a variety of questions. So students were asking again in a Google format. So it was more individual than is typical in a classroom, but siblings and parents weighed in and it became a family activity, and these were all submitted virtually to the teacher. And then from the Google Forms, the teacher was able to download into a Google sheet. And then in the Google sheets, students did open and closed ended questions and they also did the prioritization. So there was some collaboration once the questions were developed. There were a lot of next steps. I'm not going to share all of them right now but students did a variety of different reading. They posted some of their findings and they picked some close-ended questions to build a base. So again, those close-ended questions are incredibly useful. And then I'm sharing the last one is a professional learning example and this is using a tool called Padlet which I really recommend. I've only learned it in the last couple of months and I just love it. Some of you already know it well. This was on a live webinar. So I had a group of educators who were responding to this image and what I'd really like to do, we think it might be kind of fun, if you are moved to, would you share any questions that come to mind for you when you see this Q focus? And then we'll look at what the group from the webinar last week had to say about this. So, just any questions that come to mind, and I did give -- I gave a primary source with a citation. So I see what does it mean to be an American? Where is this? Why did the store owner need to post this banner? Where are the people? Who wrote the sign? What was the context? When was this taken? Why is being an American so crucial to this person? The audience. What ultimately happened to the banner? Was the store owner afraid? Who took the picture? What kind of car is this? Who's the store owner? Was the store owner proud? Was this during quarantine? Was the owner proud or frightened? Well, thank you all so much. Keep posting questions as they come to mind. One thing I hope you can see is that it's really -- if you do have any live meeting software, it's really cool to be able to be able build off of other people's questions and many people use the QFT without any live meeting software. So there are lots of online collaboration tools where you don't need Zoom or WebEx or anything like that. But if you do have it, we are right now, there's a chance to have that building on the questions which is really exciting. So here's some of the questions that, again, this were asked to be a Padlet, and I just want to point out, I mean, it made me really think differently about the situation that we're all in right now too. Someone asked this question. Has anything changed in our reactions to foreigners or has it just shifted slightly? Someone asked does Americanness need to be performed in some way to be valid? So, I just felt that there was a huge breadth of questions from the audience to the photographer to the context to the motivations, all the way to the resonances that this primary source had for our lives, and I really, to me that's such a powerful part of working with primary sources with teachers and with kids. There are a lot of things you can do once you get a list of questions, and a lot of people that's their first question is this generating student questions is fabulous but now what? And so, there are just a variety of examples on rightquestion.org I'd encourage you to look at. Here are a couple of other thoughts that we had. The next step might be to let students take a few questions and go look at a couple of other primary sources from the library. The next step might be a more traditional observed reflect wonder that is led by the student questions and then there could be even more questions that come out after that in-depth analysis. So, there all kinds of possibilities and we're really still just exploring what it really means to pair up primary sources and student driven questioning. So there will be more coming on this front, and it's been a really exciting partnership and collaboration with the whole team at the library. >> Sarah, speaking of the library, this is Cheryl. I see a question in the chat that I think now is a good time to ask and you can choose whether to answer. The question is can participants get access that lets them? And I'm not sure if it's the tablet lesson on Japanese Americans or if it was the previous lesson with the fourth graders, but maybe you could just answer that broadly and it looks like you have some ideas already. >> Cheryl, thank you so much, and here you go. The power of a question. Yes, you can use my Padlet template. You can access our virtual learning resources which has this template and the Google Forms template that the teacher in Nevada used. So, and again, we really encourage you to take this and run with it. I just want to point out, I was led down this Japanese American schematic path because I read a student question about Japanese American internment, and that student question was why didn't they resist? And I just -- for whatever reason, it just really stuck with me, and there are so many amazing resources on this topic many, many, many others, and there was some forms of resistance that are really interesting to take a look at. So I often feel that just one question from one student can bring learning to life. What more is possible when you get this many questions? Hundreds of questions. So I just want to leave us with a couple of thoughts. Why is the skill of question formulation so important right now? There's just a couple of last things that Andrew and I want to leave you with. The first is that we're living in the age of Google and those of us who work in the libraries as our livelihood probably know this better than both of us, we're in an age where students don't necessarily need help getting to information. They really need help sifting through information critically and really being more thoughtful and interrogating the information that they're finding. So this is a great book I would recommend, and Clive Thompson concludes by saying how should you respond when you get powerful new tools for finding answers? Think of harder questions. I think that's really relevant when you're thinking about just the millions of wonderful things that are housed at the Library of Congress, and the important piece that building those skills has to play when you're in this age of Google. There's another reason why we think questioning is more important than ever before and that's because it has a real connection to democracy and to building a more informed citizenship. So I want to just point out to you the women in the center of this image is Bernice, I'm sorry, this is Bernice Robinson and the woman in the center is Septima Clark, and Septima Clark founded the Citizenship School which was to teach African American adults basic literacy skills not just for not being cheated out of [inaudible] but also to protect their right to vote, and so, one of the things that she said, and I think Septima Clark is the great, one of the great American educators and she doesn't get enough recognition. One of the things that she said that we love is that we must be taught to study rather than to believe and to inquire rather than to affirm. So, the idea that questioning is a lifelong self-advocacy skill. It helps you participate in decision making on every level from your community to your state to your country to the institutions around you. Your schools, legal services, social services, and questioning is such an important part of that, and I think we all, now more than ever, really need to make sure that we're investing in that curiosity and that skill for our students and whatever their next steps might be. So, I want to pause there and see what your questions are for us. I know we only have a couple of minutes left, but we might be able to tackle a couple of things. So feel free to post any questions that you have for us in the chat box. >> And while those questions are coming in Sarah, Andrew, I just want to -- this is Cathy McGuigan from the Library of Congress. I just want to say thank you so much for that amazing interactive presentation today. It really gave us a lot to think about. For those folks who need to move onto their next class, I want to go ahead and post a survey in the chat. We'd love for you to give us some feedback on this webinar. We are offering certificates for live participation only. Not for those watching on the chat, but we can only certify for live participation. Please send me an email with your first name and last name to kmcg@loc.gov, and I'll put that into the chat box in a second. And as I mentioned throughout the program on the chat, we are going to post the recording and a PDF of the slides today which will have the links. We will post that to our webinar page. And out today is our summer schedule for our summer webinar program and we hope that you will take a look at that after the program and sign up for a great slate of presentations this summer. Sarah and Andrew, thank you so much for a wonderful presentation. I will hand it over to you now to address some of the questions that may have come in. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. I saw a couple of things, and Andrew, flag things you see too. The key focus we showed you primarily images used as primary source for the Q focus, but you can use any primary source. You can use almost anything as a Q focused prompt. So you could certainly use text. You can use a quotation. You could use a video, a sound clip. You can really use almost anything as that initial prompt for questioning as long as it's not one of your questions because that's the piece that we're trying to rewrite and give this space during the QFT over to the student's questions. Did you see other questions? >> Sarah, I see one on text-based -- can you do this with text-based primary sources? Do they all have to be images? And I saw another question on I'm a museum director and want to use this on field trips. What extensions do you recommend we give the teachers for this to do in the classroom? >> Yes, we work with a lot of educators who are working in not traditional classroom settings and certainly museum educators have been, really some of the first early adopters along with librarians of the question formulation techniques. So we do have more resources for you at rightquestion.org, and if you click on teaching and learning that will lead you into our full resource library. So I saw someone asking about an arch -- visual art class. We have some visual art examples, and we do have some informal non-classroom settings as well. And what I would say is if you're in a non-formal setting like a fieldtrip there is an abbreviated version of the QFT that you can try too. So the standard introductory QFT often takes about 45 minutes or so, give or take, and you have to adjust that timing to your students, your objective, and your context. But you can also do the QFT really quickly especially if you have a group of students who have already had some familiarity. So I used to do it in 10 minute do nows. That was after I really got them trained pretty well. It is a flexible tool. You are meant to tailor it. So certain things like discussing the advantages and disadvantages of open and close-ended questions, you might not want to do that every single time you use it. It could be a discussion you have the first time and you revisit the next time. So there are a lot of resources on rightquestion.org about how to do that tailoring really effectively. >> All right. I saw someone ask about whether they were interested in their colleagues attending, they couldn't attend during this time. What other opportunities might there be. I was wondering if you want to share a little bit about both short term and also the long term Library of Congress primary sources project? >> Sure. We have and the library has just a really exciting docket of live webinars coming up too. So I would definitely recommend checking out their offerings. We have some live webinars coming up, and again, you can find that on rightquestion.org. So we have a couple of webinars coming up in the next two weeks that are really about using this process with different virtual tools, and then as Andrew is alluding to, we're working with Cheryl, Cathy, Vivian, and others at the library and developing a what will hopefully, assuming that we can get back into classrooms soon and some of our teachers can do the lessons that they were looking forward to doing, we are hoping to develop an online course that would be open to all educators around best practices for using this process with primary sources and scaffolding that and really maximizing what you can get out of combining the question formulation technique and the really rich pedagogy of the teaching with primary sources program. And we believe that those two methods of teaching fit together really seamlessly because both of them hold inquiry as sacred at the center. And I think it's going to be really exciting to see it play out in real classrooms and you can see real teachers and real students engaging in this process in more detail. So that's what's coming and we will just hope that some of the teachers that we're working with are back to work very soon because you can do the question formulation technique virtually, but you can't film it that easily. You can't film students working quite as easily so we are hoping. >> Okay. Well, thank you guys. Thank you so much. Sarah, Andrew, this was really wonderful, and I want to thank my colleague Cheryl for being on the chat and making sure that we got the questions addressed. And Cheryl, I'm just going to go ahead and nudge you right now to save the chat. If you will go to file and save as. So this concludes our program. As a reminder, please take our survey and certificates will be offered for live participation. We encourage you to explore more at rightquestion.org. And as always to come back to the library for our full fleet of summer programming at our webinar page. Excuse me. So this concludes our program. Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope to see you on May 20th. >> Thank you everyone. Take care. >> Thank you. [ Silence ]