First of all, I realized that I never wrote about some follow-up teaching that I did after our last work in progress session. In that discussion, I realized that I hadn't done any explicit teaching around asking different types of questions, yet the kinds of questions that students asked seemed closely linked to the richness of their book club discussions. So I taught a mini lesson on "deep" vs. clarifying questions, and then showed the original book club video to students for a second time. This time, I asked them to write down all the questions that they heard students ask, sorting them into two columns for the two different types. Afterward we debriefed, discussing what kinds of questions we heard, and how we knew the difference between the two types. As follow-up, I've asked students to regularly come prepared to their book clubs with both types of questions, and to pay attention to whether their questions are sparking rich conversation. I'm interested to track the kinds of questions that students are asking in their book club conversations...in some ways, that alone could be the inquiry.
As I've spent more time looking at the transcript of the book club discussion today, a few things jump out. For one thing, it's clear that the students are invested and excited to talk about the book. The main issue seems to be that they're having trouble deciding what ideas and questions are worth spending a lot of time digging into. Without my guidance, they spent a lot of time trying to analyze some pretty literal, straightforward parts of the text. It was only after I guided them a little that they started to dig into some bigger ideas about symbolism and race in the book.
So now I'm wondering how I can help students develop that skill of knowing which questions will lead to big ideas, and knowing which ideas are rich and complex. Should that be an indicator? Is it even possible to teach that?
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