Questioning

Questions are often thought of as a way for the teacher to assess student understanding. In the inquiry culture of a Reading Apprenticeship classroom, however, students ask the questions—of the text, of themselves, and of each other. By asking their own questions, students surface their individual values, curiosities, and interests and generate their own reasons for reading.

Teaching students to ask questions as they read places the meaning-making process directly in their hands. When students ask their own content-based questions, at least two kinds of things can happen: they ask questions that deepen their engagement with a text, and they ask questions that deepen their understanding of the text. Sometimes the same question accomplishes both purposes.

The value of student questioning is multiplied when students make their questions public. Through this dialogue of questioning and answering, students are able to redefi ne and deepen their own understanding of the text. When they explain how they found the answers to their own or someone else’s questions or why a question was interesting or important to them, they learn from each other. Questioning in these ways can be understood as contributing to the personal and social dimensions of a classroom as well as to students’ facility with this important strategy.

The goal for Reading Apprenticeship teachers is to release to students the responsibility for generating the questions that drive classroom learning. Community college ESL teacher Anne Agard found that when her students ask the questions, important changes in students’ reading comprehension and writing result:

Hugely more learning occurs when students ask their own questions and discuss the answers together, in contrast to responding to questions posed by the teacher. This turn-around in cognitive processing seems to have profound and dramatic effects both on the development of reading comprehension and on the quality of subsequent writing. I have been acting on this insight and exploring its implications over the past few years, first at higher levels and now with good results at this lower level.

In addition, Anne sees that through the process of asking their own questions, her students are developing the independence that is “the most critical key to their future success as academic readers.”

Similarly, Caro Pemberton found that her high school humanities students responded with increased engagement when given the opportunity to ask and answer their own questions about a text. In Classroom Close-Up 7.6, Caro describes the move to this new questioning paradigm in her classroom.

ReQuest

A simple structure for having students share the questions they have generated, ReQuest, is described in Box 7.8. Students prepare questions about a text—questions they themselves can answer—and then take turns leading the discussion of them through a hand-off process: whoever answers a question asks the next one, and no one can answer a second question until everyone has asked and answered one in the first round.

For example, when Lori Hurwitz’s ninth graders in the first Reading Apprenticeship cohort read an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography in class, she asked them to think of themselves as teachers and each to come up with five questions about the text that a teacher would think were important. These questions formed the basis for a round of ReQuest. Quick rounds of ReQuest soon became a classroom staple, and writing the questions a frequent homework assignment. The questions students asked and the responses they got from classmates were a useful gauge of students’ understanding of what they had read. Lori also used ReQuest as an opportunity to model and ask students to reproduce questions that drew on a range of different kinds of mental processing to answer (see the discussion of QAR that follows).

QAR

Students in many Reading Apprenticeship classrooms learn to develop (and answer) text-based questions structured by Question-Answer Relationships (QAR).⁴ They learn that, depending on the structure of a question, the answer will be found in the text or in interaction between the text and their existing schema. Students become metacognitive and much more strategic about answering text-based questions—for their own purposes as well as on high-stakes tests. The four types of question-answer relationships—Right There!, Pulling It Together, Text + Me, and On My Own—are described in Box 7.9.

When Janet Ghio introduces her ninth graders to the QAR categories, she points out that different readers may successfully answer questions in different ways. So, for example, a Pulling It Together question for one student might be a Text + Me question for another. Janet makes sure students can explain how they got an answer. Caro Pemberton also includes this important guideline for the development and use of QAR. After asking a question, Caro’s students ask a follow-up question to reinforce the idea that the type of question is defined by what you do to answer it:

What did you have to do to get the answer to this question? How did you get the answer?

In Classroom Close-Up 7.7, high school teachers Christine Cziko and Lori Hurwitz describe how QAR works in their classrooms; they include a simple text and sample questions they wrote to introduce QAR.

Caro Pemberton has learned to entrust text to her high school humanities students, particularly by letting students’ own questions drive the learning in her classroom. In the interview that follows, she describes her growing discomfort with the role of teacher as questioner, even when the questions are open-ended. The Reading Apprenticeship framework gave Caro a welcomed nudge toward shifting responsibility to her students for generating and asking the text-based questions the class would discuss. The result for students, she says, has been more and deeper engagement with the text and with their classmates.

“In the past, I’ve approached reading assignments by asking students to respond to my questions. But I was never sure whether they got there because I sort of pushed them down the path that I wanted them to take, or they were there on their own. There has always been that feeling that I’m feeding it to them or that they’re responding in a somewhat stifled way to the questions because they’re expecting that I’m looking for a particular answer. Even when I’ve tried to ask open-ended questions, there’s still that feeling. We all have in our own head what we’re thinking when we ask questions. You don’t know for sure whether you’re getting a spontaneous answer from the kids or the kids are holding back because they’re intimidated about saying what’s on their mind or because they think you’re looking for something in particular.

“The difference when kids come up with their own questions is that the question itself indicates how deeply they’ve thought about what they’ve read. In order to ask a question, they have to understand.

“When I first started asking students to pose questions about their reading, lo and behold, I got this absolutely incredible group of questions. Day after day, I continued to be impressed with the quality of the questions.

“The kids seemed to be much more engaged in the reading. That’s part of what’s exciting about it, their level of engagement. A very different dynamic happens when they’re asking the questions than when a teacher does. When they’re leading the discussion, leading the answers, the quality of the questions really indicates that they’re thinking about what they’re reading. There’s no doubt in my mind that it helps students go deeper.”

Purpose

ReQuest is a questioning routine that helps students practice preparing, asking, and answering text-based questions. The ReQuest turn-taking structure ensures equitable participation.

Procedure

• Have each student prepare questions about a text the class reads in common. (This can be a homework or an in-class assignment.)
• Ask one student to begin by reading one of his or her questions aloud and calling on a volunteer to answer it.
• Explain that the volunteer must provide both the answer and the evidence for it.
• After a student answers, have the questioner check in with the class: Do they agree with the answer? Do they agree with the evidence? Can they add other evidence?
• Have the student who first answered the question (regardless of whether the answer was challenged) ask the next question.
• Continue until all students have asked and answered at least one question.

When students understand the role of two variables in text-based questions—what’s in the text and what’s in the reader’s schema or background knowledge—they can be metacognitive about finding answers to the types of relationships that result: Right There!, Pulling It Together, Text + Me, and On My Own. Each type has its own important purposes.

RIGHT THERE!

The answers to these questions are in the text, right in one place.

• When was the Nineteenth Amendment ratified?

PULLING IT TOGETHER

The answers to these questions are in the text, but they are not right in one place—you have to pull the answer together from diff erent places in the text.

• What do Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony have in common?

TEXT + ME

The text has part of the answer, and so does the reader.

• What do Susan B. Anthony and our new mayor have in common?

ON MY OWN

The text prompts these questions but does not answer them. The answers depend on what the reader thinks, wonders, already knows, or can fi nd out elsewhere.

• Why were men afraid to allow women to vote?

Academic literacy teachers Christine Cziko and Lori Hurwitz were eager to have their students learn how engaging (and empowering) it could be to create their own text-based questions. To introduce students to Question-Answer Relationships (QAR), they modeled and used a variety of simple texts for students to practice with. Each student practiced writing text-based questions of each of the QAR types (which require that students know the answer and/or how to find it). The point of students’ work with QAR was not to master QAR categorization but to better understand what the reader needs to do to answer the question types, which require different interactions between text and schema. Christine and Lori considered it a bonus that QAR practice also prepares students for finding the answers to the most traditional kinds of assessment questions. “We found that our students typically understood the Right There! and Pulling It Together questions easily, but they often had trouble with the Text + Me and On My Own questions, so we talked with them about why some question types are harder to create than others, and we provided practice with a variety of simple texts, like the one we call ‘David Woke Up Late.’”

⋯

David Woke Up Late

David woke up fifteen minutes late. As soon as he saw the clock, he jumped out of bed and headed for the shower, afraid he’d miss the bus again.

He looked in the dryer for his favorite jeans, but they were actually still in the washing machine.

“Dang! I told Shelley to put my stuff in the dryer! Thanks, Sis. Now what am I gonna wear?”

After settling for baggy shorts and a polo shirt, he grabbed a bag of chips and a soda from the kitchen and searched frantically for his history book. When he found it, David stuffed it in his backpack, along with his “lunch,” hat, and lucky deck of cards.

As he ran to the bus stop, he told himself firmly, “I will not stay up late watching wrestling!”

Right There!

• What did David do as soon as he saw the clock?
• What did David tell himself as he ran to the bus stop?

Pulling It Together

• Who is Shelley?
• What did David look for before he left the house?

Text + Me

• Where was David heading?
• What time of day was it?
• How nutritious is David’s lunch?

On My Own

• Should teenagers watch television on school nights?
• Should parents be responsible for waking their kids up in the morning?
• Why is David taking cards to school!?