EdSight

Dan Rothstein is an American educator, community organiser, and researcher whose career has been devoted to a single animating conviction: that the ability to ask one's own questions is the most democratically consequential and most consistently neglected skill that education can cultivate. He earned a doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and on completing his degree travelled to Israel on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he worked in youth and community organising with Mizrahi communities — an experience that deepened his understanding of what it means for people whose voices are structurally marginalised to develop the capacity for effective self-advocacy and civic participation. He subsequently served as Director of Neighbourhood Planning for the City of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where, in 1990, he and Luz Santana co-founded the Right Question Institute (RQI) — initially as a dropout prevention programme funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and quickly transformed by a discovery about the nature of educational exclusion that would define the rest of his career. He is a former National Academy of Education Spencer Fellow and serves as an Adjunct Lecturer in Professional Learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he has co-taught the course “Building Nimble and Democratic Minds: From Practice to Theory and Back to Practice.” He is co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded research project, conducted in collaboration with Northeastern University, to develop a rubric for creating socially impactful research questions. He currently serves as Interim Executive Director and Co-Director of the Research Programme at the Right Question Institute, the organisation he and Santana have led for more than three decades. His 2011 book Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions, co-authored with Luz Santana and published by Harvard Education Press, became one of the bestselling titles in the history of that press and introduced the Question Formulation Technique to educators in dozens of countries.

The Right Question Institute was born from a moment of discovery that reframed the question of educational inequality. Working in Lawrence, Massachusetts — one of the poorest cities in New England, with a largely Latino immigrant population — Rothstein and Santana were conducting a dropout prevention programme when they encountered a pattern that initially seemed like an obstacle to their work but turned out to be the most important finding of their careers. Parents repeatedly told them that they were not participating in their children's education, not attending school meetings, not seeking information from teachers or administrators — not because they did not care deeply about their children's futures, but because, as one parent put it with disarming directness, “we don't even know what to ask.” The implication was not merely that these parents lacked specific information but that they lacked what Rothstein would later identify as the foundational skill that enables effective participation in any institution or decision-making process: the ability to formulate one's own questions, to identify what one needs to know, and to direct an inquiry rather than simply respond to the questions of others. This insight — that the capacity to ask questions is a learnable skill, that it is systematically absent from the education of those with the least institutional power, and that its absence perpetuates rather than merely reflects inequality — became the organising principle of the Right Question Institute's entire programme.

The Question Formulation Technique — the structured pedagogical protocol that Rothstein and Santana developed over two decades of iterative practice and research — is the Right Question Institute's central contribution to educational theory and practice, and one of the most widely adopted inquiry-learning tools in contemporary education. The QFT is a carefully sequenced process through which students learn to generate, improve, and use their own questions, structured so that it can be facilitated by any teacher in any subject at any level without specialised training. The process begins with a Question Focus (QFocus): a provocative stimulus — a statement, image, data set, or scenario — designed by the teacher to focus and spark inquiry, deliberately formulated as a statement rather than a question, so that students must construct their own questions in response. Students then produce questions following four rules: ask as many questions as you can; do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer them; write down every question exactly as stated; and change any statement into a question. This production phase is designed to stimulate divergent thinking — the uninhibited generation of multiple lines of inquiry without premature closure. Students then work with their questions to categorise them as closed-ended (admitting a single factual answer) or open-ended (requiring analysis, judgment, or exploration), and to convert questions between these types — an exercise in convergent thinking that sharpens awareness of the different kinds of intellectual work that different question forms invite. They then prioritise their questions — selecting the three most important, and justifying their choices — and plan how to use them to guide inquiry or advocacy. A final reflection phase constitutes the metacognitive component, in which students examine their own thinking process and what they have learned about how to ask questions. The result is a technique that trains three modes of thinking — divergent, convergent, and metacognitive — simultaneously, in a process accessible to learners of every age and background.

In a TEDxSomerville talk titled “Did Socrates Get It Wrong?”, Rothstein articulated the deepest theoretical challenge embedded in the Right Question Institute's work: that the dominant tradition of questioning in Western pedagogy — running from Socrates through the Socratic seminar, the Socratic method in law school, and the teacher-led question-and-answer session of the standard classroom — is a tradition in which the teacher or authority figure asks the questions and the students or subordinates answer them. This arrangement, however intellectually stimulating for the questioner, structurally positions the learner as a respondent rather than an inquirer, and thereby fails to cultivate the most important intellectual and democratic capacity that education could develop: the ability to independently identify what one does not know, formulate the questions that would address that ignorance, and direct one's own inquiry. The critique connects Rothstein's pedagogical work to a deeper democratic argument: that institutions — schools, hospitals, courts, public agencies — are made more accountable and more just when the people they serve can ask effective questions of them, and that the cultivation of this capacity is therefore not merely a classroom strategy but a prerequisite of functioning democracy. Socrates' genius, on this account, lay in his questions; the Right Question Institute's project is to extend that genius to everyone.

The Right Question Institute describes its mission as catalysing microdemocracy — a concept that Rothstein and Santana developed to capture the democratic significance of the everyday encounters in which citizens engage with institutions: the parent meeting with a teacher, the patient consulting a doctor, the tenant appearing before a housing authority, the worker navigating an employment agency. In each of these encounters, the ability to ask effective questions — to identify what one needs to know, to seek accountability, to direct rather than merely receive — is the difference between being a passive object of institutional action and being an active participant in decisions that affect one's life. Microdemocracy is thus not a metaphor for democracy but an actual practice of it: the accumulation of millions of such encounters, in which citizens exercise genuine agency in relation to the institutions that govern their daily lives, constitutes the substance of democratic self-governance from the ground up. This framing gives the Question Formulation Technique a political significance that extends far beyond classroom inquiry: it is a tool for the democratisation of institutional power, and its widespread adoption in healthcare, legal services, social services, voter engagement, and civic education programmes reflects the recognition that questioning is not a pedagogical technique but a democratic competence. Used by more than 250,000 educators across diverse disciplines and applied in fields from medical education to community organising, the QFT has become one of the most cross-sectorally applied tools in contemporary civic and educational practice.

One of the most sustained applications of the Question Formulation Technique beyond the classroom has been in the domain of parent engagement in education — the site, indeed, where the founding insight of the Right Question Institute was first articulated. Rothstein and Santana's second major book, Partnering with Parents to Ask the Right Questions (ASCD), developed a systematic framework for using the QFT to equip parents — particularly parents who, like those in Lawrence, feel excluded from meaningful participation in their children's schooling by unfamiliarity with institutional procedures and uncertainty about what to ask — with the skill and confidence to engage effectively with teachers, administrators, and school systems. The work on parent engagement reflects a consistent theoretical commitment: that the barriers to educational equity are not only economic and structural but cognitive and democratic, that people are excluded from the institutions that affect them not only by poverty and discrimination but by the absence of a skill — the skill of asking one's own questions — that education itself should be providing, and that a tool as simple and accessible as the QFT can begin to address this exclusion at the level of the individual encounter, the individual parent, the individual child learning to direct her own inquiry.

• Rothstein, D., & Santana, L. (with Warren, M. R.). (2021). Partnering with Parents to Ask the Right Questions: A Powerful Strategy for Strengthening School-Family Partnerships. ASCD.

Dan Rothstein's contribution to educational thought is compact in its focus — a single technique, a single founding insight, a single democratic argument — but profound in its ramifications and remarkable in the breadth of its adoption. By demonstrating, with rigorous pedagogical concreteness, that the ability to formulate one's own questions is teachable, transferable, and transformative — for individual learners, for teachers, for parents, for patients, for citizens — he has restored to educational discourse a question that the centuries-long dominance of teacher-directed questioning had obscured: not “how do we ask better questions of students?” but “how do we teach students to ask their own?” The answer he and Santana developed in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the service of parents who did not know what to ask, has been taken up by educators, healthcare providers, legal advocates, and community organisers across the world, and stands as one of the most practically consequential contributions to democratic education theory made in the early twenty-first century. The connection between Rothstein's work and the broader traditions of inquiry-based learning — from John Dewey's reflective thinking and Jerome Bruner's discovery learning through Paulo Freire's insistence that the oppressed must name their own world — is explicit in its democratic aspiration, and the simplicity of its method is inseparable from its democratic logic: a technique for teaching questioning that only experts can facilitate would defeat its own purpose.

• Rothstein, D., & Santana, L. (2011). Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions. Harvard Education Press.
• Rothstein, D., & Santana, L. (with Warren, M. R.). (2021). Partnering with Parents to Ask the Right Questions: A Powerful Strategy for Strengthening School-Family Partnerships. ASCD.