Sarah-Authentic Questioning
Question: In Strategies that Work, Harvey & Goudvis list several characteristics of ‘authentic questions’ (p. 124) that are typically open-ended and encourage divergent thinking. Pose one or more of your own authentic questions about ideas in today’s readings (sample units, or reading strategies) and share your initial thinking about how you would respond to them.
In Chapter nine of "Book Club Plus" there is a sample lesson demonstrated. They are introducing the book Roxaboxen. The suggest to preview the book by showing the cover and asking questions. I think that this would be a good place to have a discussion to help the students predict what will happen in the story. Looking at this cover and not really knowing what this book is about myself I would ask the students:
1. What do you think that these people are doing in this picture?
2. Why do you think that the main idea of the story is going to be?
Both of these questions "may require further research, have many answers, cause us to ponder or wonder, lead us to seek out further information, and are subject to discussion, debate, and conversation" (Harvey and Goudvis, p. 124).
Personally if I was asked these questions I would respond with the following. I think that this book is about a group of children who pretend to play a type of fighting game. It looks as if there are two different teams. There are possibly "good guys vs. bad guys." I think that the main idea about this book is going to be about children creating a game where there is good vs. evil, and good wins. This makes me think about when I would play kick the can or hide and seek in my backyard when I was little.
I think that while predicting a book by its cover it would allow the students to practice their questioning skills as well. This may be a good place to have the students come up with their own questions based on the cover. I think that it might also be interesting to see if the students can use their visualizing skills to figure out what the story is saying before reading the words. I have never seen a lesson done i this way; have you? In my experience predicting and asking questions from a book's cover has worked well; can you think of any disadvantages it may have?
Sarah, in preschool we do a lot of lessons this way because the children are used to "reading" books by looking at the pictures. The children always really enjoyed making these predictions and it helps to get them thinking about the story and engaged in what is going on. It also opens up conversation during the story as we talk about what is happening with the plot and the characters. Obviously we are using less complex books at that age but I would think it would be the same type of lesson at our 3rd grade level. I always enjoy these lessons because it is interesting to hear the student's different perspectives!
ReplyDeleteI like the authentic questions posed on page 124 of Strategies that Work because it reminds me of what we would do in TE 348. I really enjoyed the conversations we had in that class and always wondered how to get my students to talk that way. I am interested in how i could plan to pose these questions to my students as part of my unit plan.
The lesson I was planning on bringing to class this Thursday is on pg. 112 called "Some questions are answered, others are not" and I was going to use Voices in the Park. I like this book because at the 3rd grade level, the students would actually be able to think critically about all the random things that are in that book and the different storylines that take place. A couple questions I would ask them is, "why do you think all the characters are animals?" and "what do you think the different animals represent in their different personalities and storylines?"
I wonder how my students would respond to these questions since they arent really used to being asked analytical questions about texts that they are reading. I think I would get some basic or off topic answers and it might be kind of hard to get them to dig deeper into their thinking. Do you think your kids would be able to think in this way? How would you go about doing this?
Sarah,
ReplyDeleteI actually used this method when I was doing DRA testing. I thought for the most part it was good, but sometimes the students would just look at the words and start reading from them instead of working off of the pictures. I think that doing this method really depends on the book. I read aloud a book to a small group of students called The Giving Tree (I'm sure you have all heard of it) and that book would be hard to do predictions in and come up with questions from them because it is all in black and white and the pictures are very vague. However, a book such as Green Eggs and Ham would be a perfect book for the students to come up with predictions because the words and the pictures match up great. Not only do the words and pictures match up but the facial expressions on the characters are very noticeable and the students are able to figure out how they feel just by looking at the illustrations.