The Right Question Institute Civic and Voter Engagement Strategy
“Engagement for Election Day and Beyond”
Facilitator’s Guide
Ó The Right Question Institute
Table of Contents
I - The Right Question Institute (RQI) Strategy ------3
II - Facilitating the RQI Strategy ------8
III - Workshop Activities Overview ------32
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Source: www.rightquestion.org
Free access to the Right Question Strategy is made possible by the generous contributions, large and small, from many people around the country. If you value this work and want to see it disseminated more widely, please consider making a donation to the Right Question Institute.
The Right Question Institute Civic and Voter Engagement Initiative has received in previous years invaluable support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, the Whitman Institute and many generous individual donors for the development and testing of this resource.
I - The Right Question Institute Strategy
A Unique, Simple and Powerful Educational Strategy
The Right Question Institute (RQI) has been working with and learning from people in low and moderate-income communities all over the country for the past 20 years. During that time, RQI has developed a simple but powerful educational strategy that has been used by many people, no matter their education, income or literacy level, to advocate for themselves and participate in decisions that affect them.
The Right Question Institute's Strategy is grounded on teaching people two simple skills:
1. The ability to focus sharply on key decisions that affect them.
2. The ability to produce their own questions, improve their questions and strategize on how to use them.
These are skills that are “foundational” for effective self-advocacy and democratic action. Although essential to civic engagement these skills are all too rarely shared with the people who could most benefit from using them. We change that. The teaching of these skills is at the heart of The Right Question Institute Strategy for Civic and Voter Engagement.
The RQI Strategy offers a unique approach to nonpartisan civic and voter engagement by first investing in building skills that people can immediately use to help themselves and their families. Learning the skills through a series of participatory exercises in the workshop, In the Land of Decisions, leads to another very important result. Participants discover for the first time the connection between decisions elected officials make and their lives. As a result, they not only have new, relevant and useful skills, they also become more motivated to vote.
New skills and increased motivation to vote. That’s quite a combination. Professor Donald Green of Columbia University, the nation’s preeminent expert on voter mobilization strategies, has demonstrated that motivation is one of the most important factors in increasing voter participation among groups that traditionally have not voted at high rates. When you increase motivation to vote by arming potential voters with skills that they can use on Election Day and beyond, you are helping them take new steps towards greater self-sufficiency and more effective democratic action.
Sample evaluation from the 2004 voter education pilot
Key Points about the Workshop In the Land of Decisions
In the workshop, RQI’s Question Formulation Technique™ and Framework for Accountable Decision Making™ help participants develop skills they can continually use to help themselves.
The Question Formulation Technique™ (QFT™):
The QFT is an unusual teaching and learning tool that helps participants develop sophisticated thinking skills through a unique process that is both tightly structured and very open to participants' input. It is designed so that participants can:
· Produce their own questions
· Improve those questions
· Strategize on how to use their questions
The QFT starts with a structured process for participants to learn how to produce their own questions. Once they have produced their own questions, they learn how to distinguish open and closed-ended questions and practice changing them from one type to another. They then look more closely at their questions and prioritize which ones they need answered first.
At the end of the process, participants deepen and reinforce their understanding by discussing and naming:
· What they learned
· How they learned it
· Where and in what situations they might use their new skill
· Why it is important to know how to formulate their own questions
Why teach the skill of asking questions? Questions, above all else, are essential for learning, as some college presidents have made clear. In a 2003 interview with The New York Times, Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, noted that a students' college education must teach students “analytical skills of interpretation and inquiry. In other words, know how to frame a question.” Nancy Cantor, the president of Syracuse University, similarly stated that the world is so complicated that “the best we can do for students is have them ask the right questions.”
The Framework for Accountable Decision Making™: Steps for Focusing Sharply on Key Decisions
In the course of RQI’s work around the country, an interesting pattern began to emerge among people who were most effective in using their new skill for formulating questions. Their questions consistently focused sharply on decisions.
We learned from the people we worked with and pulled out a series of steps that allows people to quickly climb a very sharp learning curve and become more sophisticated and effective participants in decision-making processes that affect them.
The very first step is to learn exactly what a decision is and how to identify when one is being made. Identifying decisions is a step usually overlooked or skipped over. It makes the rest of the RQI process possible.
In the steps that follow learning how to identify decisions, participants focus their new question formulation skill on three key aspects of decision-making:
q The process used to make the decision
q The role that they can have in the decision-making process
q The reasons for making the decision
At the end of these steps, participants deepen their understanding by discussing and naming:
· What they learned
· How they learned it
· Where and in what situations they might use their skill
· Why it is important to know how to focus sharply on key decisions
Changes in Participants: What happens when people begin to formulate their own questions and focus sharply on decisions?
The RQI Strategy offers a deceptively simple teaching and learning process that can be challenging for people who are accustomed to others asking questions of them. But once they have the chance to learn the skills taught by RQI, they become:
Active and Engaged and have a greater understanding of the role they can play to influence the decisions that affect them.
Critical Thinkers that are better able to generate their own questions, identify decisions and patterns, analyze and categorize concepts and strategize on how they can use their new insights.
Advocates and Citizens using the skills to help themselves and to more effectively participate in a democratic society.
II. Teaching the RQI Strategy
The Facilitator as a Catalyst for Building Skills for
Self-Sufficiency and a Stronger Democracy
Teaching the RQI Strategy is simple. The facilitator guides participants through a series of carefully scaffolded activities to practice building the question asking skill. The process is different from what the facilitator and participants might be accustomed to and requires a small but significant shift in practice.
The Shift:
From
Facilitator as Question-Asker
To
Participant as Question-Generator
The role of the facilitator is to keep participants on task and thinking in questions. Regardless of what options are used for sharing the strategy, the participants need to be the ones generating the questions, thinking about decisions, reflecting and naming for themselves how to use and apply what they have learned.
That’s it. All the rest is commentary and exploration on how best to make that shift.
The following section offers some tips based on lessons learned from facilitators teaching the workshop.
Believing in Participants and Being Prepared for Resistance
When introducing the workshop, let participants know that they are going to learn new skills and that learning to do something new can sometimes feel difficult or strange. As facilitator you should stress that once they learn these skills they will find that they can use their skills to help themselves and their families in many situations.
With that said, it may still be difficult for them to move into asking questions on their own. Remember that you are asking them to reverse perhaps an entire educational history in which they have simply responded to questions. They might not be accustomed to thinking in questions and certainly not used to being challenged to come up with their own questions. That’s why the workshop, In the Land of Decisions, gives them several opportunities to practice the skills, use them in different contexts, to reflect on what they are learning and to think about how they can use what they have learned.
Here are some ways that the simple shift in practice might be challenging for facilitator and participant alike.
A. Facilitatorsmay want to: / B. Why this might undermine the
RQI process: / C. What you can do:
· Give participants some questions to start off the question-producing process. / This may seem like a good idea, but it can actually stifle learners’ thinking; they may feel that they cannot come up with questions as good as the facilitator’s examples. / Be transparent and say this will be a different experience and that there are lots of questions that could be asked and you do not want to start it off before they even have a chance to come up with their own.
· Jump in quickly when learners hesitate to ask their own questions / Participants will need more time in silence to think, even if that silence is uncomfortable for them and the facilitator. / Let them know that you are comfortable with just waiting until they are ready with a few questions. It’s part of the learning process.
· Suggest a better way to phrase a question. / Rephrasing a question can change its meaning; also it is no longer owned by the person who formulated it. Some may cease to participate. / Make sure you write down the question or repeat it exactly as participant asked it. Changing or editing a question can make participants more self-conscious asking their own questions.
· Judge and comment on the quality of participants’ questions to encourage them. / Commenting on questions might place more value on some questions than on others. Validate all questions equally. A simple “Thank you” lets participants know that you welcome and value their participation. Note: Doing these activities one-on-one can be challenging because they do not have other participants to stimulate their asking questions. In this case it is perfectly acceptable to give praise as a means of encouraging their efforts. / Act as a non-judgmental recorder of questions, and a supporter of participants formulating their own questions.
· Answer participants’ questions immediately, sometimes even before the steps are completed. / Completing all the steps before talking about answers will provide facilitators with the opportunity to work with participants to come up with a plan to get their questions answered. They will be more likely to take responsibility for finding answers to their own questions. The goal is to get them thinking critically; you may not need to answer all of the formulated questions. / Use the process and the directions as a guide that helps participants complete the whole process and prepare them to analyze what they learned and how they learned it.
The facilitator is working in this way as a coach, helping participants develop new skills by prompting, guiding, and supporting them through the activities.
Suggestions for Implementing the RQI Strategy
There are two key components:
1. The Workshop
2. Follow-up Activities
The Workshop
The workshop can be completed in an hour and a half. However, facilitators can make their own judgments about whether to complete the workshop in one session or to present it in sections. These decisions may be based on:
q The amount of time available to work with a particular group.
q The literacy level of participants. Lower level learners may have an easier time absorbing the concepts if the workshop is presented in sections.
q Other activities or objectives that have to be completed.
If the workshop is done in sections, the following modules are suggested:
q Day 1: Activities 1 and 2: Making Decisions and Asking Questions
q Day 2: Activities 3, 4, and 5: Elected Officials, Electing a President,
and Evaluation
The workshop guide is scripted. Teaching tips for facilitators included in the margins of the scripted guide provide helpful suggestions for keeping the workshop running smoothly.
If the workshop is done in two sections, be sure to review the work done in the first session as a transition to introducing the second.
Follow-up Activities
These activities are designed to help people put into action what they have learned in the workshop and get ready to vote. You might already be doing some of these activities in your program. The “In the Land of Decisions” workshop must precede these activities. The workshop helps people understand the importance of voting, and builds skills to better seek and internalize information.
Some Tips for Troubleshooting
The workshop was field tested in 2004 and 2008 in adult literacy programs, with several groups of adult learners, to assess the effectiveness of the activities in achieving the goals. The lessons learned during this process were instrumental in designing the final version of the workshop, identifying areas that could present challenges and developing strategies to deal with those challenges.