One of our challenges as teachers of literature is to encourage students to move from simply answering questions we ask to formulating their own questions. To get at this, I have students write two discussion questions every day we meet as a class and e-mail them to me no later than 30 minutes before the class begins. From there, I take the questions, group them according to common themes and lead a seminar-style discussion. (This format works better in upper division courses, but this is easily adapted in larger first year courses by imposing earlier deadlines).
Students need to learn how to ask discussion questions, because too frequently they simply ask questions that focus on plot points or basic facts. While it’s important, certainly, to make sure that everyone knows what exactly happens, that focus doesn’t get at the interpretive work that makes literary studies enjoyably challenging. And it doesn’t encourage critical thinking.
So I give the students time to practice. For the second day of class I assign the students a brief reading (usually a few poems). In class, I pair them up and give them direction about how to ask questions; they work together to develop questions, put them on the board and then evaluate the quality of the questions; we collectively brainstorm ways to improve the questions that don’t open up discussion.
To get them started on writing the questions I provide two frameworks: one based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, and another based on the critical thinking paradigm developed by Richard Paul and Linda Elder*. With this latter option, I provide the students with templates of questions, which I’ll reproduce here:
Purpose: What is the character trying to accomplish in saying this?
What is the central aim in this line of thought?
Information: What is the most significant information that we can find in this text? Why?
Inferences: How did that character reach that conclusion?
Concepts: What is the main idea in this reading?
How does the reading explain this main idea?
Assumptions: What are the underlying assumptions about this concept? Within this reading?
What justifies those assumptions?
Implications: What are the implications of this?
Point of View: From what point of view should we examine this text?
And because I think it’s only fair, I provide them with some sample questions – both potentially good and bad discussion questions. Most recently, I’ve based them on what I’ve recently seen on television:
Poor discussion question:
Where did the third season of Jersey Shore take place? (This question doesn’t work because it’s not open-ended. This would simply result in identifying a location at a specific point in a television series, but not particularly lead to meaningful discussion of that series.)
Better discussion questions:
Do reality shows like The Jersey Shore and College Hill portray real life? (A bit more open ended, though vague.)
Do reality shows like The Jersey Shore and College Hill perpetuate pernicious stereotypes of certain ethnic groups? (Better. It’s open-ended and requires a degree of judgment. Also embedded in this question is a need for specific examples to make the argument one way or the other.)
What does the celebrity of the people from The Jersey Shore suggest about celebrity culture? (A question that in part follows upon the previous question, but also invokes – implicitly – the implications of the show.)
What is the effect of reality television that portrays the lives of college-aged people on the current student population in the United States? (Another implication question – and one that moves beyond simply considering the shows. It asks for information beyond the shows themselves.)
Do reality television shows do harm? (A final judgment question that again will require specific information, and will ask for evaluative consideration.)
The point is not to suggest that you would need to use my particular frames for questions; the point is instead that with some templates and some practice our students can develop their own questions. As the semester goes on, the questions become more complex, and often become multi-part questions, as students recognize that the answer to one question will have further implications for the interpretation. It sometimes seems a slow process, but the payoff is that students are thinking about what they read outside of class; and most importantly to me, they begin to develop substantial skills at developing important interpretive questions for their written assignments.
It is, after all, about figuring out what we do with that basic question: how do the words make meaning?
*Richard Paul and Linda Elder’s Critical Thinking Paradigm is available through The Critical Thinking Community, an arm of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, a non-profit geared at improving education and society through the fostering of critical thinking skills.
I like the possibility of doing something similar in a creative writing workshop–asking students to bring questions (rather than just answers) to the workshop could yield more discussion of writing technique than prescriptive recommendations sometimes do…
Papatya: That’s an interesting idea. I think that it’s important for student writers to realize that other people will interpret their works in ways unexpected — and perhaps having students treat something for workshop in the same way that we treat a piece of literature might create some different insights into the way that the work is received.
It also occurs to me that writing discussion questions about a written work might be useful in critical classrooms as well — students might bring questions about, say, the implications of the line of thought in a draft of a research paper that would be more useful than “This doesn’t make sense to me.”