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.
The list of authentic questions that were listed in the text book are:
What makes you think that?
Why do you say that?
Can you elaborate on that?
Can you tell me more about your thinking?
How did you come up with that?
Statement: My favorite reading strategy from the reading is “Beyond-the-line” questions.
Authentic question: What makes you think that?
Response:
I enjoyed the reading strategies that were in todays readings. My favorite strategy is “Beyond-the-line” questions in literature. This is my favorite because students are able to “dig” deeper into the reading instead of just surface level knowledge. Students are able to respond to inferential questions, that are genuine questions, and respond with a answer. Now the answer cannot be just a quick one or two words this has to be a response that causes you to deepen your knowledge. All of the authentic questions that are listed above students would be able to answer with their response to “BTLQ.” With being in a second grade classroom I do not think the students would be able to respond with such a lengthy response as in the textbook. But I do think they would be able to write a paragraph. We could also guide the students with “guiding questions” or the beginning of sentences and they respond with how they feel. If we modeled these different reading strategies to the students, in time, they would be able to respond to these authentic questions in the proper format.
Questions to consider: Does you MT use authentic questions when responding to students? What reading strategy could you see working in your classroom? How would you respond to these authentic questions?
I agree that Beyond-the-line questioning is a great strategy for the same reason you said, it gets students looking deeper into the text. If your students are able to do that, especially independently, i think that's great. I also think that when you make students write about how they feel about something, you are really making them think about it. They are investing themselves into the writings. My MT uses a little bit of authentic questioning. She will occasionally ask students to elaborate and to explain their thinking, but it is not a daily occurrence. However, when the students are asked to explain more, they are usually able to do so. Since we have the lowest 17 first graders, I really think it would benefit our classroom to have the students explain their thinking more often and to help one another by answering these authentic questions asked by the teacher.
ReplyDeleteThe strategy i see working best in my classroom is the "some questions are answered, others are not" strategy on page 112 of Strategies that Work. I think this strategy would work best in my classroom because we would be able to do it as a class and we could actually write the questions the students have on the board. I would then be able to read the story to them and they would be able to come up and code the questions we had. Then, as a class, we could figure out if the questions had been answered or if we need to think a little deeper into the story and figure out the answer. I think if we did this sort of questioning many times as a whole class, we would be able to eventually have the students do it on their own. It would take a lot of scaffolding for our first graders, though, to be able to do it on their own.