Questioning Questioning

In Bomer's Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms, I found his suggestions for inviting thoughtful and energetic conversations useful. For my reader's reference and mine, they are the following:

• Open with a broad invitation to readers to say what they are thinking.
• Give it (being the agenda setter) to the readers.
• Engage ourselves in participant talk rather than always procedural instructions.
• Listen and maintain awareness of the students' point of view. 
• Eliminate the evaluation part of the initiation-response-evaluation talk pattern common in schools.
• Build ideas together.
• Invite and sponsor connections.
• Keep asking why.
• Pull on differences to draw them out.
• make trouble and get students comfortable with it.
  (Bomer 137-139)

While Bomer's notes were useful, I found one of his criticisms of common teaching methods to be lacking. He recommends "just not asking questions to which you already know the answer" and instead "just state whatever it is about which [you are] clearly wanting to remind them" (Bomer 137). I've noticed that high school and college students tend to also criticize this kind of questioning because "Why ask questions you already know the answers to?" 

Unless I'm missing something, I think that Bomer and these students are forgetting an important skill questioning provides: application. If we're only telling or reminding our students what we want them to know as Bomer suggests, we're only transmitting our knowledge to ears that may or may not be listening. Skillful questioning allows for factual questions to be answered and thus, an application of a skill or knowledge and formative assessment. I believe that skillful questioning can also help students learn to make inferences, a skill which they can later be scaffolded to be able to use on their own with more complicated texts as their responsibilities as a reader increases. 

Conversations are very important to have in class, especially alongside teaching students how to have these kinds of applicable conversation skills in other contexts. However, I don't think that "asking questions to which you already know the answer" should be so easily dismissed. 

Social Relevancy

Today's reading from Bomer's textbook, "Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms" reminded me of a discussion in my UTeach class about relevancy of texts. The major point taken from that discussion was:

If a text can't be related in some way to today's society, you should probably choose another text.

Bomer suggests that we call in other texts to relate to what we are teaching and to use the real world to relate to texts. While it's nice to read texts for fun, I think that the true purpose of literature and in turn, writing literature, should be to make some form of a social comment. I would like my students to be reading texts that are relevant to current social issues, so they can have something useful to form opinions on. 

We're blessed to be living in a democratic society and no matter how imperfect ours is, we are privileged to have the freedom of voice, and it is our job as educators to empower our students to contribute to our democratic society with the use of socially relevant texts.

At the same time, I would like my students to have opportunities to read just for fun, like the dessert books I mentioned in my last post. While I think that it's important for texts to be socially relevant, I don't want to destroy a student's interest in reading by only forcing them to read texts of my choosing. Maybe there's a way to guide them to choose texts on their own that can help them develop their own social commentary. 

Dessert Books

I loved reading Encouraging Independent Reading with Ambience: The Book Bistro in Middle and Secondary School Classes because if my teachers had implemented something similar to the Book Bistro, I know I wouldn't have lost the joy of reading.

Only once was I given the option of what book to read in a classroom setting. My sophomore English teacher, already a lovable and popular teacher, offered our class the choice between two Shakespeare plays, Othello and Twelfth Night. We chose Othello and in general, I did enjoy reading Othello. I can't say whether or not I would've enjoyed Twelfth Night more and if our choice was a good one, since I still haven't read the latter, but the fact that we were given a sense of agency in our learning always stuck with me.

Giving students agency in their education can lead to an enjoyment of texts. Vladimir Nabokov talks about three facets of being a great writer (and a great reader): magic, story, and lesson. These facets as agents can be enchanter, storyteller, and teacher. As teachers, we tend to stay in the lesson sphere. What is this text really trying to tell us? What can we take away from this text? Why the hell am I teaching or reading this piece? 

I think once students have a chance to choose their own books and are even given time in class to read independently, they will be able to enjoy a book for its magic and story. I believe once they can enjoy these two, the lesson will follow. I envy my future students; I want to give them time in class once a week to read what my UTeach professor calls a "dessert book," something enjoyable to the student that they can pick out on their own.

An issue students raised in a survey in Encouraging Independent Reading with Ambience was the lack of time and motivation to read independently at home. I don't think that allowing students to choose what book they want to read will solve this completely; sometimes the time just doesn't exist. By giving them time in class at least once a week (or even daily and incorporating their books into a warm-up journal) to read independently with no pressure and in a relaxed setting (allow them to eat a snack, put on some quiet music), I think we as teachers can further encourage the enjoyment of books.