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By Doug Buehl
Recent polls reveal that . . . 68% of Americans . . . believe . . . support . . . trust . . . want . . . 47% of Wisconsin citizens . . . are most concerned with . . . have doubts about . . . would vote for . . . prefer purchasing . . . 52% of women . . . 29% of college educated . . . 38% of households making $50,000 a year or more . . .
It is a rare edition of a daily newspaper that doesn’t inform us, in some way, what we are thinking. The topics vary widely – our views on public issues, our attitudes towards political leaders, our personal preferences, our most strongly held beliefs. “Experts” uncover our thoughts and opinions primarily through polling. In short, they ask us.
Yet like many folks, I suppose, I am dubious about what these polling results really tell us. Sometimes what people tell pollsters actually reflects subsequent actions they take, and sometimes decidedly not. At times polling information mirrors our take on reality, and at other times the results do not resonate at all with what we are personally experiencing. In addition, polling data often seems so transient and volatile; what is emphatically reported one week can be dramatically different a month later.
One contributing variable to the reliability of polling concerns the questions we are asked. When I have been so surveyed, I have found it occasionally difficult to respond. I can provide an answer, but often my thinking amounts to “more than that.” And frequently, I am prodded to provide a narrow answer, the straight “yes” or “no” dichotomy favored by lawyers grilling a witness under oath. It doesn’t necessarily help to indicate “how strongly” I feel, or whether I can opt for “unsure.” I might indeed be very sure; I just would not have phrased the question that way.
Of course, that’s the key issue: were you asked the right questions? And more importantly, were you not asked the questions that you really cared about? Getting answers that matter is directly related to asking the questions that are most significant.
Asking the right questions is also essential for the learning we expect of students across the curriculum. Traditionally, we have focused on the questions we, as teachers, ask. We have emphasized examining whether our questioning has the correct mix of fact-level versus upper-level thinking, and we have focused on questions as a means to monitor and access student comprehension.
However, several Reading Room columns over the years have advocated strategies that engage students in generating their own questions about the texts they are reading. Rather than expecting someone else – the teacher, a textbook editor – to identify what questions should be entertained, students learn self-questioning strategies. These strategies underscore that proficient readers elicit their own relevant questions about written texts.
The strategy
Self-questioning strategies are based on the premise that reading is an act of inquiry, that we read because we wonder about things, because we are curious, because we have questions. Yet the questions we ask are also governed by the nature of the material we are reading. Many of the questions that matter the most are “discourse-specific.”
Step 1: Begin with activities that prompt students to record some of the things they were wondering about as they read from a text within your curriculum. Students need to become accustomed to posing their own questions as they read, rather than relying on a set of external questions to track their comprehension.
For example, asking students to jot down five things they “were wondering about” as readers reinforces that proficient readers actively entertain questions as they interact with an author’s message. As they share their questions with partners or in cooperative groups, students begin to pool their thinking about a text and pinpoint items about the text they believe warrant further discussion.
Step 2: The first step focuses on providing students with ongoing practice in generating their questions about written texts. The next stage is to mentor students into the types of thinking characteristic of different academic disciplines. What types of questions are of most interest to historians about texts they study? Mathematicians? Biologists? Musicians?
This stage of questioning instruction emphasizes the modeling of “discourse-specific” questions through teacher think-alouds. Each academic discipline is configured to help students examine relevant information through a different intellectual lens. Examining a text through the perspective of a biologist, for example, will generate a different set of relevant questions than those asked of a literary work.
For example, consider the questions that would be germane to understanding a baseball game through the lens of a dedicated baseball fan: How will the pitcher decide to handle this batter? Where should the fielders position themselves for this particular pitch? What are this batter’s tendencies? How has this batter fared before against this pitcher? What should the next pitch be, given the previous pitches, at bats, and the immediate situation in this game? And so on.
Questions that might be relevant from other perspectives do not seem a match to understanding the game the way a “baseball insider” sees it. For example, the following questions might be interesting to a host of individuals, but they do not contribute to understanding the game of baseball through the lens of an insider: What type of fertilizer do the groundskeepers apply to insure the durability of the ballpark grass? What style of clothing will Brewer players wear after the game? How do the variables of physics interplay with the trajectory of this fly ball? In terms of the financial health of the team, is a sacrifice bunt on this play cost effective? What is the nutritional value of this bratwurst?
While such questions would be tangential, irrelevant, or even laughable to a baseball insider, these sorts of queries do potentially represent alternative ways of “understanding” a baseball game. The point is not that these questions are not reasonable, but instead that these are not the “right” questions from an insider perspective. “Insiders” – knowledgeable and experienced observers within a specific domain of study – wonder different things than “outsiders.”
The task of teachers within a content discipline is to help their students see the world through the insider perspective of their subject area. This means that students need to be mentored into what questions an insider would care about when attempting to comprehend a particular subject-related text. Frequent think-alouds allow teachers – classroom insiders in an academic discipline – to display the range of questions that build understanding of texts in a content field.
Step 3: Questioning the Author, developed by Beck and her associates (1997) provides an excellent framework for modeling “insider questions.” Questioning the Author is a strategy that focuses on questions a reader might pose of the author of a text under study. These generic questions ask: What is the author trying to tell me here? What does this author expect that I already know? What seems to be the author’s point here? Is it clear to me what the author is saying? And so forth.
Questioning the Author (QtA) can be further refined to exemplify the discourse-specific questions of interest to an insider in a subject area. For example, a teacher of literature might model QtA questions such as the following for the study of literary works like short stories:
Such discourse-specific questions cue students into examining a text the way insiders – in this case of literary works – pose questions of themselves to try to ascertain what an author is communicating to them through the genre of a work of literature
Advantages
As students encounter a range of discourse-specific questions across the curriculum, they will become increasingly able to adjust their thinking to match the academic discipline under study.
Further Resources:
Beck, I., McKeown, M., Hamilton, R., & Kucan, L. (1997) Questioning The Author: An Approach For Enhancing Student Engagement With Text. International Reading Association, Newark, DE.
Doug Buehl, teacher, Madison East High School
Wisconsin State Reading Association.
Posted October 25, 2006