Chapter 5 ?????????????s

“By maintaining a balance between asking and answering questions, the teacher returns responsibility for critical thinking to the students.” (100)

I think that quote spoke to me because I’m so romanced by the idea of teaching kids critical thinking/logic skills. I’m into it to a fault, though, and I realize that. This chapter actually pointed this out to me when it listed Aristotle’s styles of questioning. Logos wins for me, every time. Pathos and ethos make me impatient and I think “let’s move on to the useful questions.” I know, inappropriate. I’m working on it.

This chapter deals with questioning in the classroom and provides strategies to enhange questioning. AS we’ve all learned, all questions are not created equal. It is imperative, according to Fisher and Frey (and everyone else ever), to engage students in higher-level questioning 0 asking questions that require synthesis, analysis and evaluation rather than recall of facts. The chapter also devotes attention to the fact that students should be engaging in their own questioning, balancing teacher-directed and student-directed inquiry. They should be monitoring their own understanding by self-questioning as well as creating questions for others as the composition of (specifically higher order) questions promotes critical thinking and reflection beyond rote memorization.

The text recommends several strategies. The one I would be most likely to use, I think, is QAR. I like that the degree of difficulty is graduated so students can start with a simple, knowledge- or text-based question and expand on it through critical thinking. I think this helps students create these higher-level questions by understanding that yes, you do start with the facts printed on the page, and then you branch out and make connections to other material and inferences from the text to gain a richer understanding.

Some of the other strategies included SQ3R (and its many mutations [do I mean permutations?]), questioning the author (always hated that one in school, but I think I never saw it done well – the featured question the author about Annabel Lee and Poe was awesome, but then it’s hard to make anything dealing with beautiful Annabel Lee not awesome; this strategy always reminds me of Dear Mr. Henshaw where that kid spends the entire year writing to an author he likes about his depressing life with his single mom…), and ReQuest (which I felt was a study skill and in no way fit in with this chapter, which was about how to come up with, answer and think about high-order questions – not about handy ways to memorize information in the text, which is what this sounded like it would help with).

Is it better to take one or two of these strategies and use them all year so students are super familiar with what they are doing and can just work with the concepts/material at hand (slash questioning skills) or should you practice a lot of these techniques concurrently? I feel like you might spend a lot of time explaining the procedure for what you’re doing and it might be convenient to say “okay guys, we’re going to QAR this sucker” and everyone knows what you’re talking about and can get to work.