We would like to introduce our readers to the QUESTion Project!
Howard Gardner interviewed founder, Gerard Senehi, to get a sense of what this important project is all about. Their conversation below will give you an outline, but please read this paper (Education's Role in Shaping the Future) to learn more about the QUESTion Project’s view on the promise of whole child education and social-emotional learning.
What is your goal with this paper, who are you trying to reach, and what do you want them to take away?
I propose to prepare students in two ways: for their own future lives—and for becoming citizens who are engaged and care for the common good. I’m trying to reach educators, policy makers, and others who care about the future of education. I hope to heighten awareness of what is possible, outline the methods to achieve it, and make more room in education for this important work.
Why is this important?
We are failing to address the whole child, to strengthen the core of what makes us human. We are also failing to prepare our youth for a rapidly changing and unpredictable future, as well as some of the challenges they and society will experience. I want to convey urgency but also introduce new possibilities. I think it’s only by bringing light to concrete possibilities that we can expand our approach with students in thoughtful and healthy ways.
We must provide students with an outlet and method to make sense out of life. Otherwise, students can easily feel disconnected from themselves and from others—depressed, anxious, with a feeling that something is wrong while not having a way of knowing what that might be. The consequences of not having this support are evidenced in the current mental health crisis of our youth.
As for the broader society, we must create a space where students from all walks of life can see and experience this idea: we all are on a common human journey together, even as we each have our unique path. Otherwise, we will not overcome the false barriers that too often separate youth from one another and that they then carry into their adult lives. The result: a depressingly divided citizenry.
How have you addressed this in your own work in education?
For a long time, I felt there was something fundamental missing in education. Twelve years ago (in 2011), my wife Francesca and I went on a quest to identify and tackle this missing piece. Our intention was to empower students’ authentic identity (or identities), their confidence in their agency to express and pursue who they are, and their identification of purpose in their lives and future. We wanted to go beyond teaching social-emotional skills and support students with the core of what makes us all human.
Over five years, we worked closely with many groups of students and teachers; we sought to identify some of the most important questions/topics about life and design the best ways to engage with them. In doing so, we co-created the QUESTion Project (a program of the nonprofit Open Future Institute). This is a semester/year-long daily class where high school students engage together with questions about who they are and how they can shape their lives with meaning and purpose. The class is delivered as a credit-bearing elective, advisory, or part of the health class. Teachers go through a training regimen that focuses on the understanding, methods, and dispositions that can engage students’ humanity and empower students’ agency on a shared learning journey.
Through this process, students define their identity as they explore their relationship to life. They are helped to take charge of their lives—not just considering what they are going to do, but also who they are going to be. They develop an ongoing relationship with purpose that can inform their lives and futures. And they do all this together, with vulnerability and openness, which allows them to express their own and experience each other’s humanity. When this approach works well, students break down fundamental barriers between them—barriers that otherwise are often carried into adulthood, further perpetuating divisions in society.
A recent study of the QUESTion Project found a significant impact on individual students. They also identified important implications for schools and society: a multi-faceted way to support student wellbeing, overcoming assumptions about others, and engaging with purpose as an individual and for social good.
As the implications of engaging students in this way go beyond our organization, we believe it’s important for us to share our discoveries and test our conclusions.
what are you calling into question, and what are the misunderstandings?
I believe that there is a fuller way to understand what it means to address the whole child and to support educators in doing so. In the paper accompanying this introductory note, I go into detail; I seek to convey how it’s possible to approach the core of what makes us human in very concrete ways, without reducing the approach to something narrow and losing the depth of what it means. This is part of the tremendous potential I see ahead.
I caution against the limitations of addressing only one or a set of social-emotional skills without engaging the underlying layers that define our humanity. I’m also concerned with certain approaches that address aspects of what makes us human—such as identity or purpose— in a way that, regrettably, can sometimes cause more harm than good.
An example: Suppose we reduce deeper elements of who we are, such as identity, to a set of labels or over-simplified ideas to which we “lead” students; this well-intentioned approach can inadvertently make students adopt static labels that limit the ongoing development and discovery of who they are and who they can become. We have to make room for students to embrace areas of life as profound as identity and purpose in a way that holds the depth and complexity of life; otherwise, whatever our laudable intentions, we do students a disservice.
Tell us a bit about your own background and what inspired you to create the QUESTion Project
My education at a first-rate college gave me great skills and knowledge, but it did not provided me with a way to find out who I was, and left me deeply confused about life, without a way to determine how to go forward.
When I became a teacher, the situation became clearer. What had been missing in my own education, particularly in high school, was something missing in the overall school system. Still, I had no idea how to address this lack, this gap, this uncertainty. Only two decades later did the pieces of the puzzle start to come together.
One day the president of my college wrote to all alumni/ae expressing his concern for the development of character and citizenry of his students and asking for advice. In response, I offered the nascent ideas for what is now the QUESTion Project. It took a few more years and the collaboration with my wife, our team, hundreds of students, and teachers for the QUESTion Project to take the full form it has now and that I describe in the accompanying paper.
What challenges do you anticipate and how can you resolve those?
I see two main challenges ahead. The first is for educators, funders, and policy makers to recognize the fundamental need for and importance of this work. There is of course accelerating recognition of the importance of SEL and character development, but that is not enough. We need to make a compelling case for going beyond supporting students with a set of knowledge, skills, or attitudes; we need to support the deeper elements that make us human. We need to implement this approach (or others in the same spirit) with theoretical rigor, demonstrable practices, and research, just as the world of education has been doing with respect to SEL.
The second challenge is anchoring this work during the school day. School leaders are naturally concerned (particularly in this post-COVID time) with shifting student learning time and teacher resources away from addressing learning loss, grades, and graduation. And, understandably, they sometimes see the time needed for programs like the QUESTion Project (a semester/year-long class) as something that competes with those objectives and, since it does not lead directly to higher SAT scores or admission to selective schools, as an extra that can be discarded.
However, after having worked with 18 public schools and 12,000 students for the last 7 years, we have an uplifting message to share. School principals tell us that the development of identity, agency and purpose in students not only contributes to the students’ wellbeing and mental health; our approach also supports their academic achievement, helps their college essays, and gives them a stronger foundation for college preparedness.
What do you most hope to achieve with your work, and how can others carry it on?
The purpose of this work is for students to have structured support and space to engage with some of the core aspects of what makes us human, to do it together with their peers, to have the opportunity to bring out the best in who they are and how they can contribute to others. I see an approach like this as foundational for the creation and maintenance of a thriving society.
Of course, I hope that the QUESTion Project will spread to schools broadly. I also see our work as an important piece to a larger puzzle and need—a new subject field in education that places students’ humanity at the heart of the learning process. Students need this kind of age-appropriate support at every stage of their learning journey. This need is much bigger than a single project like ours. To that end, I hope to bring light to insights that can be foundational to build a new subject field, a new discipline, a new theme and focus in education. My dream is that all teachers in the future will have access to training that includes the understanding, methods, and disposition that can best engage student’s humanity and empower their agency on a collective learning journey. My fondest hope is that the accompanying essay will contribute to that long-term aspiration.
As far as how others can carry it on, this will necessarily and properly continue to be a co-creative process. Neither I nor my close colleagues have all the answers! The best insights, decisions, and paths forward reveal themselves as we engage together and stretch our minds and hearts to consider what is truly going to best serve students and society. Envisioning what’s possible allows us to create innovative approaches and solutions these should enable our youth to engage with the deepest parts of themselves, develop the skills to fully embrace life and contribute to society, while holding room for the mystery and wonder of what life is all about.
How optimistic are you about the possibility you envision?
Every step we (and other organizations who focus on this work) have taken strengthens the foundation for what will be possible.
Some people tell me “The educational system is never going to change.” My sense is that the system won’t change…until it has to! And the way that it will have to change may only become clear when we realize that we have no other choice.
If we continue to fail to prepare students in a substantial way for their lives and future, we will continue to experience a mental health crisis. We will perpetuate barriers that stem from our inability to see our common humanity in our differences. And we will continue to be unprepared to respond to the needs of this moment in history…not to mention the challenges of an even more rapidly changing world.
On the other hand, at a time when the educational system fully supports students to develop their authentic identities, to take their lives into their own hands, and to pursue a life of purpose, we will be standing on completely different ground.
In the end, declaring that the current system will never change limits what is possible. Systems do change and that takes time; therefore, this work requires a long-term mindset. We need to lay the foundations for this change with as much integrity and foresight as we can and fervently strengthen and demonstrate a vision for what is possible, as others have done before us.
We advise our readers to look at Senehi’s paper, Education's Role in Shaping the Future, to learn more.