Try These 5 Techniques that Ensure Students Do the Talking
We all know the statistics and, well, we talk right over them! Teachers do far too much talking in the course of the day, and students do far too little. I don’t say that to teacher-bash, but rather as a way to invite you to hit the pause button on over explaining and over guiding, and try these techniques that lead to student-driven, amazing discussions about the content you teach.
Model the mindsets.You gotta be all-in! Fully commit to the goal of your students controlling the learning conversations. Talk about and co-construct charts of the characteristics of productive dialogue. The key characteristic? Active listening, which means students concentrate on what the speaker is saying and push aside distracting thoughts. Active listeners learn to respect theories and conclusions that differ from theirs—as long as the text provides adequate support for the assertions.
Remember, old habits die hard. Raising hands doesn’t cut it during student-led conversations, so you’ll have to wean students off of that tradition. Instead, students talk, one at a time, while peers listen and process ideas. Once a student finishes, a peer jumps into the conversation. Tempted to rescue the conversation? Hold your breath, count to 10, trust your students. With practice in whole group, small group and partner discussions, your students will thrive in a month or two.
Equip students with an arsenal of question types. Model what it means to arrive at a guiding question, and then coach students to develop their own.Guiding questions are those that can go broad and go deep, and align with students’ authentic curiosities about an issue.For example, fourth graders were investigating self-selected books on natural disasters. Students agreed on this guiding question: How do natural disasters affect people’s lives? Even though each student read a different book, the guiding question was broad enough to stimulate rich conversations. Interpretive questions are also open-ended andhave more than one answer. Have students consider verbs that will help them pose interpretive questions: analyze, examine, compare and contrast, evaluate, show, classify, I hand out lists of prompts to keep discussion flowing to each student, so they have this concrete support at first.
Find your new niche. During discussions, especially as students are just getting the hang of purposeful dialogue, listen from the sidelines and every once in a while, and only when absolutely necessary, pose a clarifying question—one that nudges students to get back on course or go deeper in some way. For example, maybe the question gets a student to say more, define a term, go back to the text, or think about whether he or she still believes his position. Author Renee Houser reminds us that a lot of this nudging can be done without our even talking! Think about non-verbal gestures and facial expressions that might work.
Be a social engineer. One of the many benefits of student-led discussions is that they allow you to listen and look at your students in new ways. Ask such questions as: Who is doing most of the talking? Which kids are obsessed with the same authors or topics? Who is particularly adept at active listening or posing questions? Which students have natural rapport? Who might I pair that may be in different groups of friends, but I now see will be great talk partners?
Enjoy, as Lester guides you from teacher-centered to student-centered teacher read alouds!
When you reach the end of an article, a story, or a book do you reach for your notebook to answer a set of questions written by someone else? Do you feel that your understanding of what you have read, your worth as a reader, hinges on being able to give the answers to someone else’s questions? Probably not. Yet it seems that much of our reading instruction relies heavily on having our students answer a set of questions after they complete a reading assignment. Following reading with a set of questions is a longstanding practice in literacy education. In fact, many commercial reading programs follow this pattern. One well-known program assigns a point value to each title, then has the children read and log on to a computer to read and answer a set of 10 multiple choice questions. Other programs have students read then write answers to similar questions. And if we are teaching from a literature-based approach that doesn’t rely upon a commercially produced program we tend to have our own questions to hold our students accountable.
Questions Can Create Patterns
As teachers, most of us were introduced to Bloom’s Taxonomy as undergraduates in a teacher education program. We likely practiced developing questions for each of the levels in the taxonomy and began our teacher careers believing that it was our charge to develop good questions that would hold our students accountable and yield proof that they read and understood the assigned text.
We sat with our notepads at hand and read the books, articles, poems, and various other texts our students would read across the year. We paused at various points in the text to draft the questions we would give our students. We were attentive to character traits, shifts in the plot, nuances in word choice, the author’s use of simile and metaphor and figurative language. We noted allusions to cultural references and other literature. We were alert to the role of setting in the text, the way the author used dialog, bias, and narration. We read closely and synthesized as we developed the questions we would present to the students. Questions, whether presented by the program or developed by the teacher, may fall into a pattern or categories. For example, questions about the main character, physical descriptions, main idea, vocabulary, opinion, evaluation, analysis, synthesis, inference, etc.
As students read and respond to the questions presented they begin to recognize the patterns as well. Does this impact the way they read? Does it shape what they tend to notice and pay attention to? In other words, are they reading with the pattern of your questions in mind? If the answer is, yes, then what are they failing to notice? What is the cost to comprehension and attention and engagement?
Get In Touch With Ways You Read
Consider your own thought process as you read a text with the intention of writing questions for students to answer. Are you beginning with a frame in mind? That is, do you begin with thoughts focused on Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? Or do you begin with the intention of finding three detail questions, two questions about the character’s motives, three questions that require the reader to interpret, two that require analysis, and one that calls for synthesis? If the answer is, yes, then how does this frame influence YOUR approach as a reader? How does that process differ from the way you approach a professional text or a book you have selected to read for pleasure? How does the approach effect your engagement with and your comprehension of the text? Chances are that you read differently when you read for pleasure than when you read with the intention of developing a set of questions for your students.
Who’s Doing All The Thinking?
I have come to believe that the person who is asking the questions is the person who has done the thinking. As you read to develop the questions for your students you were summarizing the text at critical points. You were evaluating the merits of details and the use of Literacy devices. You were synthesizing information and generating new thoughts. You were noticing were the text called for an inference or expected you to have adequate background knowledge to connect to a metaphor or allusion. In short, you were doing the deeper thinking, the more thorough analysis as a reader in service to the development of questions that would yield the proof of your students’ connections and comprehension.
Time To Flip the Read Aloud
I invite you to try something the next time you are reading aloud to your students. As the story draws to a close and your voice delivers the last line simply close the book and exhale. Pause for a few seconds and let silence settle over the group. Then, look at them and speak quietly: “Think for a few seconds. Don’t speak yet, just think if you could speak with (author, illustrator, character, expert—beekeeper if the story is about bees, etc) what are the three best questions you could ask? Think about that, please. I’ll ask you to share your questions in just a moment.”
Have your notebook ready to jot down the questions as they share. At the end of the day when the students have boarded their buses to leave, revisit those questions and place them into four categories: Vocabulary, Background knowledge, Schema/conceptual frame, and other. Take note of where the majority of the questions fall. Think about what this reveals to you about their understanding of the text.
I’ve come to believe that I find out more about where their understanding fails by examining their questions than I ever got from checking their answers.
The practice of asking questions to drive students’ learning is alive and well in schools today. But here’s the rub! Too often questioning is recitation where the teacher prompts students for the “one right answer” to questions she has developed. Moreover, at school, who should be posing the questions? To foster independent readers and thinkers, students need to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to asking and answering questions. If teachers always control questioning, then student learning is greatly diminished because students aren’t discussing ideas that have relevance to them.
On the other hand, when quality, student-generated questions define a class, meaningful learning takes place—learning that defines reading, research, collaborative projects, literary discussions, and units of study. As students wonder and question and use their questions to learn, they develop the ability to raise questions while reading. This keeps them focused on a text, but also motivates them to read on to find answers to their queries.
When Do Students Ask Questions?
Opportunities abound throughout the day for students to pose questions. Here are a few:
Mini-lessons: Invite students to jot down questions they have while you present a mini-lesson and ask these when you’ve finished. Such questions clarify students’ understanding and help them absorb new ideas. However, students’ questions can offer you insights into what they do and don’t understand. With this information, you can design interventions based on observed needs.
A daily teacher read aloud: Frequently, students pose questions about a conflict, theme, or how events connect. Reserving a few minutes for students to ask their questions shows them how much you value their thinking and provides you with insights into ways students react to the text.
Setting goals: Help students understand that raising two questions such as, Is there a strategy I should work on next? What do I have to do to reach this goal?” can improve their learning. Such questions develop independence because they place students in charge of decision-making.
Self-evaluation: Questions can also drive students’ evaluation of their work over time, such as reviewing several journal entries in their notebooks, the entire process for a piece of writing, several quizzes and test grades, or their participation in collaborative projects. Here’s a sampling of questions that students might ask: Did I improve? How do I know I made progress? Is there something I did that stands out? Did I struggle? How? What did I do to cope with my struggles?
A result of self-evaluative questions is the development of metacognition, the ability of students to reflect on their written work, collaborations, and learning to improve critical thinking and problem-solving.
Close reading: Isabel Beck and Margaret G. McKeown’s strategy, questioning the author, provides students with questions for fiction and nonfiction texts. The questions help students link words, phrases, and ideas to construct meaning from a passage they find challenging. While close reading, the student might ask: Why did the author use that word or phrase? How does the word or phrase connect to the information in the sentence? To information that came before the sentence? How does the paragraph or section connect to the title? The theme or main idea? The previous paragraph or section? These questions can develop independence in unpacking meaning from challenging passages in texts.
Inquiry-based learning: Before and during a unit of study, students generate questions that drive their reading, investigations, experiments, and discussions. Researchers like Jeffrey Wilhelm and Michael Smith, show that when student-generated questions steer the direction studies take, they are more engaged and motivated to learn. Inquiry fosters collaborating, recalling and understanding information, analyzing texts, and meeting deadlines. Students enjoy the process far more than when teachers direct and control students’ learning.
Reading texts: Teach students how to pose open-ended, interpretive questions and invite them to work as a team when reading an assigned or self-selected text. Open-ended questions have two or more answers. Verbs such as, why, how, evaluate, explain, compare/contrast can signal interpretive questions. Returning to a text to write open-ended questions deepens students’ knowledge of plot and information, but it also raises the level of discussions to analytical and critical thinking. In addition, discussing their own questions motivates and engages students in the reading and in exchanging ideas.
The Teacher’s Role
Providing a model for students, one that shows them how to raise questions during diverse learning experiences is a primary job of teachers. Becoming a skilled questioner won’t happen quickly for most students. However, turning the questioning process over to students gives them opportunities to practice and to make their studies more meaningful. Equally important, when students are in charge of questioning, they develop independence in learning.
Meaningful reflection by teachers and students –reflection that considers improving questioning techniques and gathering feedback can create a learning environment that values students’ questions as a path to progress in all subjects.
In a celebrated poem by Robert Frost called “A Tuft of Flowers,” a worker mentally sends a message to a colleague who has labored earlier that day on the same task with which the narrator is concerned, and he says: “Men work together, I told him from the heart, whether they work together or apart.” And that’s the way we work, as librarians and teachers of reading on one hand, and authors and illustrators on the other. We are colleagues and co-conspirators who put our energies separately, but together, into the very important and exciting work of turning kids on to books, giving them a passion for their written and spoken language, and opening them up to its vast communicative and artistic range.
As creative partners, we depend upon each other to do our work with care and sensitivity. You rightfully expect authors and illustrators to put into your hands’ books whose words and images can be effective tools for reaching, inspiring, and moving the children in your care. Happily, that expectation is being validated by a surge of interest in literature-based reading programs throughout the country. It seems to be fueled by the growing conviction that children don’t become particularly excited about basal readers, workbooks, ditto sheets, nor do they file into libraries to check them out. They do become excited about stories and pictures that capture their imaginations. Like all of us, they are drawn to works that communicate in the language of feeling, which is the way that elusive thing called art so effectively reaches us. And the communicative power of art, as it is utilized in its varied means of creative expression (from architecture to painting to literature to drama), has been a compelling outlet for every culture and civilization since man’s beginnings.
An increased emphasis on the role of children’s literature is a challenge to librarians and teachers as well as to their partners in publishing. Your role in our collaboration is to share the books with care, enthusiasm, creativity, and love so they have the maximum opportunity to reach their audience as effectively as possible. Although authors, illustrators, editors, art directors, designers, and printers all work together to produce a book, it’s not until the book is actually read and looked at that it really comes to life. Until that moment, it’s a darkened theater—a tableau frozen on a stage in a vacant auditorium. But when the teacher, librarian, parent, or friend opens the cover and shares the book with a child, the theater is illuminated, and, as the pages turn, the curtain rises and falls on successive acts and scenes. Through that reading and sharing the words come to life, and the illustrations move and flow with action, feeling, and vitality.
Of course, each book must stand on its own merits and earn applause and approval from whoever experiences it. But if you bring a child and a book together with a sensitive understanding of that particular book—if you recommend and share and read the book aloud as if you were a part of its creative life—then that book has a much greater chance of being special to that child. And you will be remembered as being part of that book, and part of that gift, as surely as if your name were engraved on the jacket and the title page: a colleague, a co-conspirator, a creative partner.
I have loved picture books since my childhood, and I recall with deep gratitude the relatives who were sensitive enough to give me books as gifts and to share both the books and themselves in magical read-aloud sessions. I had a passion for drawing as a child, and I used to make up my own tales and illustrate them for my two younger sisters, Patti and Martha, in a ritual we called “telling stories on paper.” On a rainy Saturday afternoon, or just before bed, I would sit between them with a stack of paper on my lap and a pencil in my hand, and I’d spin some kind of a bizarre yarn while scribbling illustrations to accompany the narrative, passing them first to one of the girls and then to the other. I found the process of “telling stories on paper” enormously compelling, and during those early days, before the blessings of editorial intercession were available to me, I would rattle onward with interminable enthusiasm until my dutifully attentive sisters were each buried under piles of pictures or comatose with boredom.
My childhood fascination with illustrated storytelling persisted into young adulthood and shortly after graduating from college I began sending manuscripts with accompanying sketches to major publishing houses. When I was offered a contract to illustrate George Mendoza’s stories “The Hunter,” “The Snake,” and “The Hairy Toe” in a forty-eight-page book entitled GWOT! Horribly Funny Hairticklers, I was ecstatic.
I had a wonderful time putting the book together, and I sent copies off to various friends, particularly those who had encouraged me to make the leap into publishing. Among these was a couple who lived in New York with their precocious but rather shy four-year-old-daughter named Helen. They were concerned that exposure to stories like “The Hunter,” “The Snake,” and “The Hairy Toe” that were assembled in a book entitles GWOT! might prove to be a traumatizing experience for her. But because I had illustrated the book and inscribed it to their Helen, they dutifully read it to her at bedtime. Several nights later, my wife and I were invited to their apartment for dinner, and in response to my knock the door swung open and there stood Helen in a ruffled party dress. For a moment she remained poised with a sweet hostess smile on her face. Suddenly, it transformed itself into a jubilant mischievous leer, and she screeched “GWOT! I Love You!” It was obvious that the book had not traumatized her in the least, and indeed her parents, to their ultimate despair had to reread the stories night after dreary night for many, many months.
Helen and her family moved to the West Coast, but I continued to send her my books as they were published. A few years ago, the second oldest of my stepdaughters was married and Helen, now a young woman and an established television actress, flew east with her parents to attend the wedding. I had not seen her in quite a few years, and, as the deception in our backyard was nearing its end, Helen and I strolled along the edge of the woods together, and she brought me up-to-date on all that had been happening in her life. And of my books, which are still on her bedside shelf. She told me that whenever she opens them, the words and the pictures are a magic carpet to her childhood. She feels that she is once again a little girl snuggled against her parents as they read the stories aloud, and she happily loses herself in the illustrations that were once spread across their laps.
In reflecting on Helen’s involvement with her books, I realize I had known something intuitively when beginning my career that I am convinced, thirty years later, is indeed true. Too often, I think, we define children as a bland herd, and we do not adequately recognize the complicated variety of personalities that they, as a group, represent.
There should be made available to kids, as well as to adults, a delicious smorgasbord selection of books that deal with many facets of human experience. We should provide books that present an opportunity to explore a great range of emotions, exposing children to stories and images that inspire laughter, tears, shivery-spooky feelings, flashes of glowing, loving warmth, and insight. They should be acquainted with books that contain the creative approaches of many different authors and illustrators so that each young reader can find the ones that speak to him or her with particular clarity and poignance.
Helen’s recollection of the way in which her parents shared books with her is also revealing. I believe that the picture book’s finest hour occurs during a read-aloud session when the book is bridging two laps and uniting the reader and the audience. The reading adult’s voice unlocks the magic of the story, inviting the child to enter the lives of the characters and to explore the landscapes that are delineated in the illustrations. There is a special warm and personal quality to the participation in that shared experience that is not duplicated while seated in front of a television set in a darkened room, and it is important for all of us who love children and books to continually express the value of reading aloud.
