Generating Questions

Reaction to the section “Generating Understandings of Text” (p. 54) from Chapter 3 of Content Literacy for Today’s Adolescents

I don’t know what to do about these teacher-textbooks that are telling me how to increase literacy in the content areas. I am an English teacher whose main task (despite the fact that the State Framework has four competencies to work through with students) is teaching students how to read, to think while reading, and to think about the content of what has been read. Literacy is a huge part of my job, but I cannot do literacy the way the teacher-textbooks want me to do it.

Of course we want “generative learning.” My own education in high school and college was full of this. My training in high school forced me to think critically, and my college education was centered on creating good questions for texts that I was reading. But I also know that I had to have the “generated” material (the DOK 1 recall stuff) before I could ever start the task in high school.

So while I love the idea of students writing their own questions, I am still overwhelmed by covering the basics that could lead up to such a thing to make it worthwhile. You need to memorize the alphabet before you can go about spelling. You need to memorize some spelling before you can have decent word recognition. You need word recognition before you can interpret sentences. If the foundations are missing for my kids, most of whom are well below grade-level, they are not going to ask questions of any consequence—or rather, they’re only going to ask questions whose answers they knew beforehand.

In trying to cope with my frustrations, I am thinking that a good way to get kids to be eventual generative learners is to give them a series of questions to choose from. The students must read all the questions, but then select the questions they want to answer. So out of 20 questions, they select five. Then they can compare with someone else who might have selected different questions. The class comes together to fill in all the questions that they did. The teacher will select a few of the questions that no one chose and answer those in front of the class. After doing this several times, eventually the students can start writing their own questions, and then as a class we can record the questions, and then students can pick a certain number of the student-generated questions (their own and others’) to answer. At last, they will ask their own questions and do work to answer them.

I feel that they need to be eased into the asking of questions before they can ask them. My job as a tenth grade teacher in the Delta is to do nine years of this in a few weeks. We’ll see how it goes.