Click, Clack, Moo and Follow-Up Questions

Today was step one towards a successful podcast about our nonfiction texts. It is time to have meaningful conversations about literature. I feel that this will help me in my quest to create lifelong readers.

The first step to meaningful coversations is to create meaningful questions. When students are dropped into a discussion setting, they don't know what to say to one another. They know how to share answers, but they don't necessarily know how to ask for help from a peer. They know how to say that they don't get it, but they don't know how to vocalize what it is that they don't get. They have to learn how to ask good questions about their reading in order to take them to the next level of understanding and analysis.

To do this, we started by discussing characteristics of good questions. I have to be honest here--I tried to have the students generate characteristics, but it fell totally flat. They didn't have a clue what I was asking for or what I wanted. They knew what a good question was when they saw one, but breaking one down and explaining why it was good was a bit too much.

So I listed characteristics of good and bad questions on chart paper and we started by looking at that list. We contrasted the two. We looked closely at the pros and cons. We cleared up any confusion as to what was expected. After our brief discussion, we created a six-celled chart using a piece of notebook paper. The left column was for the start questions and the right column was for the follow-up questions.

Now for application. I decided to start with a brief piece by Pat Conroy. His writing is so deep and it is something that I want my students to be familiar with. They might not come Conroy lovers today, but I want them to see the goldmine that is in their backyard. After reading a brief, controversial piece that looks at a situation of spousal abuse, I gave them think time. They had to write down a start question using the characteristics of good questions. After everyone had a chance to write down a start question, I asked for one volunteer to share. We took that question and added it to the first cell of our chart. We discussed possible answers and the created follow-up questions based on those answers. This went on a for a few minutes, and we repeated the process with a new starter question. I pointed out how the conversation could only continue with a good question. Failure to ask a good question would lead to a dead end. I demonstrated this by asking a few bad questions of my own and showing that the conversation could go nowhere.

That scaffolding led to Click, Clack, Moo. Students used the cute children's book to generate starter questions that met the characteristics of good questions. It was a nice lead up to individual work. Just a little more scaffolding and we'll be having powerful conversations about texts that are meaningful to us.

I hope.