Lexington Community Education presents: Students and Classrooms Transformed: Why We Need to Teach Our Students to Ask Their Own Questions: An Evening with Dan Rothstein, Ed.D.

The ability to ask questions may be the single most essential skill for learning, yet it is rarely deliberately taught. Great teachers often model how to carefully craft a question to get their students thinking in new and different ways. The notion of the teacher leading students through a challenging thinking process is grounded in a venerated tradition that goes back at least 2,500 years to Socrates. Recently, however, there is a small, but significant change in that tradition that is having a dramatic effect on student learning and teacher excitement about teaching in schools across the United States and beyond. In their book, Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions, Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, Co-Directors of The Right Question Institute, describe how teachers are deliberately teaching students how to produce their own questions, improve their questions and strategize on how to use them. The results are striking in suburban, as well as urban and rural communities. Successful as well as struggling students who begin to ask their own questions become more engaged in their education,take greater ownership of their learning and actually learn more. Co-author, Dan Rothstein, is a Lexington resident and parent of two children who are Lexington Public School graduates and one currently at the high school. He will present inspiring examples of teachers teaching students how to ask their own questions and compelling examples of students who make new connections, get excited about learning and move well beyond the too frequently heard question: “Will this be on the test?” Rothstein will also introduce the specific technique teachers are using in elementary, middle and high school classrooms, across different subject areas and levels. Participants will also have an opportunity to actively use aspects of the technique and see it in action. Dan Rothstein, Ed.D., has spent many years learning from the people with whom he has worked as part of The Right Question Institute  and has applied those lessons to designing strategies to promote more effective advocacy and citizen participation efforts. Prior to his work with The Right Question Institute, he developed and implemented educational programs in Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Israel as a community educator, organizer and urban planner. He served as Director of Neighborhood Planning for the City of Lawrence, MA and was a Fulbright Scholar and one of the very few non- academics to be chosen as a National Academy of Education Spencer Fellow. He graduated from Harvard College and earned a doctorate in Education and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he served as an editor of The Harvard Educational Review.