Sarah Westbrook (she/her)

Director of Professional Learning • Right Question Institute (RQI)

Cambridge, Massachusetts • USA

How did you get into teaching?

Fueled by a love of literature and writing, I went into publishing in New York right out of college. Processing rejection letters, often for promising manuscripts, quickly became discouraging. I wanted to be in a position to build people up - to help them hone their craft and achieve their dreams – not topple them. My mom had recently received her teaching degree and was a brand new first grade teacher at that time. I started to spend a lot of time in her classroom, decorating bulletin boards and helping to clean up the tornado that first graders leave behind at the end of the school day. The more time I spent there, the more I felt at home. I fell in love with the kids. Teaching was exactly the hopefulness and joy I was looking for. I enrolled in the Newton Teacher Residency program and started teaching high school English while earning my MAT degree through Tufts University.

Who was the teacher who made the most positive impact on your life?

I’ve had so many inspiring, generous, committed teachers in my life, first as a student and then again as a new teacher. My high school English teacher, Judy Plott, is one teacher I’m indebted to. I had her for three years in a row because after my first class with her, I intentionally signed up for every class she taught. In my senior year, I did an independent study project with her mentorship. I focused on some of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works (this was Ms. Plott’s special interest, too). Ms. Plott was an institution (and “kind of a legend”, see page 64) at my school. She was tough, in that she had high expectations and could tell when you were just “phoning it in.” She could read–and “read” doesn’t do justice to what a performance it was– a convoluted Macbeth soliloquy and not only make it comprehensible, but also make it feel urgent, ominous, and thrilling. While it’s hard to look back and assess how she may have crafted her pedagogy, I do remember a lot of active discussions and read-alouds. Most importantly, it was clear that she was authentically passionate about what she was teaching.

What is a professional inquiry you are currently pursuing? 

What is a “good” question? What do people mean when they say that? Is there such a thing as a good question? If the definition of “good question” is not explicit, then how do you teach it?

In my work at The Right Question Institute, I spend a great deal of time thinking about questions. Our work probes some of the systemic barriers that prevent people from feeling that they can ask questions and supports individual people to build the skills they need to ask questions and participate more effectively in decision-making. In schools, there are a whole host of reasons that some students ask questions and some students do not. Many students report fear of asking “dumb questions.” There's an unspoken perception from students and educators alike that there are good questions and bad questions, but no clear, explicit definition of what they are. Does the idea that there are inherently “good questions” (and therefore, “bad questions”) discourage some students from asking any question at all? Over the past couple years, I’ve been talking with anyone I can about what a “good question” means to them. People have very different definitions, often specific to the context and subject in which they are working. I’ve also been collecting question taxonomies, or systems of question classification. I’m especially interested in how we can think of questions in terms of their function rather than language. In other words, understanding what certain questions do rather than how they are articulated. A question need not be perfectly phrased to be effective. Human language is often unpredictable; closed questions can sometimes elicit open-ended answers and open questions can do the very opposite. So, we need to ask a variety of questions to be effective in seeking different types of responses in all sorts of settings and situations. How can we remove “good” and “bad” from the equation and teach students to be more strategic in their questioning without fearing judgment? 

Some places and people who are shining light on this question for me:

Dr. Lanie Watson’s Philosophy of Questions (UK)

Dr. Steven Bloch-Schulman at Elon University, co-author of Thinking Through Questions (USA)

Elizabeth Wolzak and others who design and run Geo-Inquiry online courses at the National Geographic Society 

Fabulous middle school science teacher, Nicole Bolduc (Ellington, CT)

This great blog about close-ended questions, written by Connie Williams, librarian in Petaluma, CA

My colleagues at The Right Question Institute (based in Cambridge, MA)

What is a personal inquiry you are currently pursuing?

Recently, I've been doing a lot of internet sleuthing on how best to overwinter two enormous patio planters, full of Rios (or “Rio dipladenia,” as I discovered in one of my Google searches). I have whatever the opposite of a green thumb is; nonetheless, during the pandemic, I’ve been accumulating plants and dabbling with gardening. I hate seeing all my hard work laid waste by another brutal New England winter, so I’m trying to keep at least a few of these plants alive in my basement this winter. 

Some places and people who are shining light on this question for me:

Friends, neighbors, and relatives who appear to have flourishing gardens and a bunch of online blogs and message boards for gardeners.

What three best ideas do you have to improve the teaching profession? 

I’d like to rephrase this as: What do teachers need to remain in the profession? 

1) Autonomy and flexibility – which is to say - trust. Teachers have the knowledge of their students and the expertise in their content to innovate and adapt curriculum to best serve their students. Yet, depending on the structure and culture of the school system you’re in, doing so can feel risky. It can feel like there’s no time or the stakes are too high to try a new strategy, substitute a different piece of content, or let students follow an unanticipated inquiry. We all say we want our students to be curious – but giving them space to roam intellectually isn’t always built into the system. Teachers deserve the agency and support to take the type of intellectual risks we want to model for students. 

2) Curiosity. Teaching can be an extremely challenging job. Curiosity and humor help us find the joy in teaching and learning. The best mentors I’ve had, people who have been teaching for 20-25 years or more, were always looking for new ways to teach familiar content and asking colleagues what they were doing with students. For teachers and students, curiosity drives engagement and investment in our own growth. 

3) Professional growth opportunities. I’d like to see school systems reimagine professional growth as an integral part of the job and devote real time and resources to it. Far too often, there just isn’t enough time in the teaching day to make a meaningful commitment to sustained professional learning. Teachers should have time to co-design lessons and assessments or troubleshoot with colleagues in communities of practice. They should have autonomy to seek out professional learning that interests them. There have to be more opportunities to make lateral movement, like teaching a new class or grade level – or working in a district office or in other schools (for example, as a Teacher on Special Assignment or TOSA). I’m also a fan of sabbaticals that allow teachers to grow professionally outside of the school and contribute to the field of education in other ways. The Library of Congress, for instance, has a fabulous Teacher in Residence Program, where classroom teachers work at the Library for a year, contribute to and inform work there, and return to the classroom. What if all organizations that do work in education offered similar opportunities? What if all schools supported teachers to pursue these kinds of professional opportunities? Instead, many teachers are doing this “extra” work as thought leaders (taking courses, producing podcasts and blog posts, presenting at conferences, collaborating with other organizations, contributing to policy-making) on their own time. We need to make room for intellectualism and build a community of adult colleagues who will discuss and think with us – especially given how isolating and lonely teaching can be. 

You gotta see this!

There are fabulous resources out there for producing podcasts with students:

The Youth Media Challenge from KQED Learn offers a way for students to have their podcasts published online, with the chance to be aired on the radio. Podcasting with the California Report is a state-centric challenge, but it offers great tips for all podcasters. Project Audio: Teaching Students How to Produce Their Own Podcasts, from the New York Times, and Starting Your Podcast: A Guide For Students, from NPR, contain ideas and nuts-and-bolts advice.

To read more about the importance of asking questions for self-advocacy in the legal system, check out my colleague, Naomi Campbell’s article in the Social Innovations Journal.