Question-Asking as a Skill: Annotation Activities that Foster Student-Driven Inquiry

Last month, I participated in a course offered by the Right Question Institute (RQI), which provides strategies and resources for developing critical thinking in the classroom. The institute trains educators on the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), an approach developed by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana decades ago. In their book, Make Just One Change (2011), Rothstein and Santana stress the importance of students generating and using their own questions. Formulating questions is central to learning and creativity, as well as a foundational skill for civic engagement, assert Rothstein and Santana.

A teacher using the QFT shares a single text (called a QFocus) at the beginning of the activity–an excerpted passage, a photograph, a statement, a graph–and asks students to generate as many questions as they can about the text. Next, students revise their questions–including changing them from open-ended to close-ended questions (or vice versa)–and prioritize these questions in order of interest and importance. The prioritized questions are used to direct learning for the remainder of the class, unit, or semester, depending on the teacher’s design. Students create an action plan for answering their questions and conclude the activity with a reflection on their learning experience. 

As an instructor myself, the QFT has prompted me to reflect on how I can more effectively incorporate inquiry-driven learning into my teaching. With the rollout of ChatGPT in 2023, I restructured my online asynchronous classes around “Big Questions,” a strategy explored by James Lang’s Distracted (2020). But up until now, these questions have been created by me, based on my own understanding of how the readings in my literature course relate to each other. 

By contrast, during the QFT process, teachers are not the ones asking questions–and true adherence to the technique means not providing examples of “good” questions, either. The QFT process is shepherded by the teacher, but the teacher stays outside of the actual question-forming. This approach runs counter to what many educators are taught about the importance of modeling and scaffolding and can feel uncomfortable at first for both the teacher and the student. Its power is that it requires students to practice metacognitive thinking independently of the teacher.

With this in mind, one mid-semester adjustment that I’ve made to my Spring course is having students generate questions from a QFocus that they will investigate–and try to answer–in their final semester project, using our class readings. In this way, their summative assessment will be based on their own curiosities, rather than a question I’ve prescribed for them.

As I first learned about the Right Question Institute from a faculty member during a Hypothesis workshop where I shared “The Magic of Open-Ended Questions in Social Annotation,” I’ve also been thinking about how Hypothesis social annotation might complement and support the QFT. While Hypothesis is typically used with texts that extend beyond the narrow focus required for a QFocus prompt, my experience with the RQI has provided new inspiration for how social annotation can support student questions.

Some of these ideas fall outside of the scope of the official QFT, but they support inquiry-driven learning in other ways. Here are a few of them:

• Focused annotation:  Instruct students to focus on a single passage or phrase and generate as many questions as possible about that part of the text.

• Annotation waterfall: Adapting the “chat waterfall” strategy, ask students to add as many question-based annotations as they can to a reading or other text during live instruction. Then, use these questions to develop conversations and other classroom activities.

• The annotation as QFocus: A question I frequently get from faculty is how to encourage more meaningful and in-depth responses between students in their annotations. With the QFT in mind, you might ask students to regard annotations as texts for contemplation and analysis. How many questions can you formulate about your classmates’ comments and questions? Spend a few minutes studying one annotation, then reply with what you think is the most important or interesting question for its author.
• Image annotation: Later this year, Hypothesis will be introducing image annotation, which will allow teachers and students to annotate images with questions in real-time. Used alongside Hypothesis’s small groups integration, this could be a fantastic way to support the QFT in synchronous and asynchronous online classrooms using an image as a QFocus, as well as a great starting point for primary source analysis in humanities courses.

Do any of these strategies resonate with you? What role does inquiry-based learning play in your classroom? How has the QFT helped your teaching? In what other ways could the QFT and social annotation be used together? Feel free to join the conversation on this page with our Hypothesis web app extension!