Week of March 13: A Questioning Attitude

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

    ~J.D.Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

        How many times have we met someone who’s done something, seen something, knows something from the inside out? I’ve had a million questions for people I admire. Just getting to ask a question of someone that has something fascinating to offer can be a thrilling experience. And what if we could get inside the heads of our favorite authors? Hey, maybe we’ve already been inside their heads, it’s just that we didn’t know what questions to ask ourselves when we were reading to initiate a deeper conversation and get at the essence of the author’s thinking. This process brings up a mental image: Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz—she had the power to get home the whole time, but never thought to ask.

         With the right encouragement, preschool children already begin to discern the power of asking good questions on a daily basis, and peeling back the layers of a text or a situation. We might say they are insatiable with their “What is this? How come? Why is the sky blue? as they read the world in their natural learning environments, and have no issues questioning the authority of things. But as they mature and begin to face reading words and symbols, when they are asked it to move from world knowledge to school knowledge, they must relearn and be re-encouraged in this natural curiosity to question what they read and experience. This kind of encouragement needs to be actively shown (modeled) not told—hence, ReQuest or Self -Questioning Guide (Buehl, 157) both reciprocal questioning approaches where teacher and student reverse authority roles, and students take on responsibility for finding and asking questions using varied levels of thinking.

         QAR (Alv, 243; Buehl, 133) is perhaps the most well known strategy that helps us learn how to distinguish and pinpoint the relationship between a question and its proximity to text. It is the best strategy I know of for working backwards to help children make meaning and strengthen connections (text to text, text to self, text to world). Buehl's B/D/A questioning charts (52) can help instructors work on different levels of thinking (literal, interpretative, applied) as they anticipate what students might ask or encounter in the readings.  The same could be done with Discussion Web RE Coleen's presentation of the question, Is War Justified, or the various consolidating strategies we looked at with the Dust Bowl / Okie Migrant Unit. We will hopefully have time to review these options over the next two weeks, as well as go back to Questioning the Author (Buehl, 137) which we used to critique the 21st C learning film on the first night of class.  QTA is a way to help students independently get inside the head of the author, but it has been approached using very different kinds of language, both in narrative and expository texts, even multimodal compositions like images and music. I see it as one more step past “sourcing”, which you will want students to do with varied genres of text. We chose the QTA approach with the film because we were facing a text with a broad, convincing context, but we wanted to make sure you were able to look beyond the density of the film's appealing message in order to understand, and then discuss the intentions and perspectives of the filmmaker. 

         QTA is often considered a tool for questioning a text whose language is very flat, with seemingly no point of view or objective. Textbooks are often criticized for this. Buehl refers to these texts as “authorless” (p 137). By developing “queries” to draw out and discuss this kind of author we are, in effect, constructing a point of view or intent through our questions and taking control of the text—this helps us with our purpose for reading, knowing the significance of what we are reading, and giving us access to inference and subtext by digging at the particular moves an author might be making with the text structure, word use, etc. Through this process, teachers can learn to facilitate discussion rather than merely limit questioning to comprehension assessment.

         Though QTA is usually a response to a “flat” text, I have also seen QTA being the strategy of choice when an author appears to have a strong (if not clear) message, such as in the film—and this can be with either an informational or fictional text.  Here less proficient readers have trouble taking an active, critical stance because they accept the text’s authority, have trouble translating text into their own language, and assume how the text will be discussed. Again, the teacher needs help boosting confidence in inquiry. Remember looking for "strong lines" in the insect poems, clues in the Dorothea Lange or Stephanie's family photos, or responding in the "I wonder" column for the ASIS exercise with Mark Twain? We began a conversation with our own wonderings (roots of questions), searched for responses, and then determined a perspective. We also posed questions before and after to determine his intent. The Essential Question I originally raised with this text was, "Are we shaped by history, or do we shape it?"

         As you read and think about questioning this week, Coleen and I want you to consider why this literacy process is seen as “perhaps the most common kind of academic work in comprehension instruction” (Dole et al., 1991) and how it might pull together all of the other reading proficiencies we have been studying, including engaging mental imagery, prior knowledge, understanding text frames, synthesizing, inferencing, understanding vocabulary in context, and so on…

Finally, I have attached a brief study guide for Essential Questions and Leading/ Entry Point questions work in for teachers and students in unit design (Wiggins and McTighe article, scan TBA). I'll leave you with a few questions as you consider readings and guides. Are the VA DOE essential questions really essential, or just guiding unit questions? What questions can we ask in our unit to ensure enduring understandings, instead of the dreaded syndrome of forgetting after a unit test? Are questioning strategies only useful after reading? What kinds of questions should we ask to develop 21st C learners?

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS are designed help us “uncover” the heart of our disciplinary discourse and engage students in various kinds of literate understanding as they read and inquire within and across discipline(s). Remember, you are the designer, not the SOLs. This is your opportunity to go back and look at the questions, thoughts you have already posed in your Multiple Literacy Project and explore their relationship to the SOL content as you prepare to expand on them, and design reading and writing strategies that explore them for the Content Inquiry.

The following excerpt quotes a journal entry from a 3rd grade teacher thinking about EQ's and their teaching:

"Essential. The first definition in my iBook dictionary defines essential (adj) as "of the highest importance for achieving something."  That "something" for our purposes as educators (and learners) is comprehension. However, there is a second definition on my iBook that applies. It states "being the most basic element or feature of something or somebody." To me a basic element is a building block that is essential (of the highest importance) to reaching our goal of comprehension. Therefore, essential questions are both basic and of highest importance. 

I had an ephiphany while reading the Wiggins and McTighe article. It was not so much that I did not understand essential questions; I've read about them on the VA DOE website, typed them into my unit organizers, and I've thought about them. My epiphany came from seeing essential questions not just as a goal of comprehension, but also as an element to planning the whole unit. Sure I knew what they were when I planned my unit, but I did not plan the whole unit around them, with them, or from the ground up based ON the essential question. Now I see them as part of the hook or cue set, while at the same time they are part of the bigger picture.

W & T Article Overview: 

The use of Essential Questions promotes enduring understandings; in other words, true not just surface comprehension.  Essential questions pose dilemmas, subvert obvious or canonical "truths" and force incongruities upon our attention:

"Is gravity a fact or theory?" ; "Is biology destiny?"; "When is war justified?" ,"Are mathematical ideas inventions or discoveries?"; "Do artists reflect the world or shape it?" ; "Who is responsible for what happens to Earth--human beings, or mother nature?"; "Are stories just for entertainment?"

Characteristics of Essential Questions:

* Go to the heart of the discipline

* recur naturally through learning

* raise other important questions 

* are not always the best doorway into a specific topic--can be too global, therefore may also need related unit questions (closer to what SOL column offers).  

Purpose of Essential Questions: 

* Frame the learning

* Engage the learner

* Link to more specific or more general questions

* Guide exploration of ideas

* Establish priorities

Entry-Point Question Guidelines:  (hook or cue set for frontloading)

* Should be in student-friendly language

* Maximal simplicity

* Provoke more questions and discussion 

* Point towards the larger unit and essential questions

Comprehension Strategies that focus on questioning (not exhaustive)

* BDA Questioning charts

* Use of Bloome's Taxonomy (HOTS) or see Self-Questioning Taxonomy

* Question the Author (QTA)

* Request

*Inquiry Charts

*Questions, Clues, Response

*QAR:

(literal-right there, inferential-author and me, scriptal-on my own)