- 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.
I appreciate your critique on Bomer's point, and I think that your argument holds merit. Oftentimes, asking a question to which you already know the answer, and the students should know the answer is a good tool to gauge how much of the information the students are absorbing.
ReplyDeleteKellie,
ReplyDeleteI think that "asking questions to which you already know the answer" is useful, but that Bomer is saying that many times students won't be engaged with their learning if they are just being asked to answer factual questions over and over again. I thought he was targeting more the issue that many teachers use questioning in a "guess what I'm thinking way" instead of asking the students what they think or know. It's a really fine distinction that I also am not sure how to use in the classroom! I think it's valuable that you are thinking about how we can keep more traditional teaching practices and integrate them with new ideas!