Jeffrey D. Wilhelm's Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry was, well, engaging! A professional read, I appreciated the reminders, the encouragement, the challenge to use more questioning within the classroom.
For an overview of the book, please visit here, where I arranged my notes for a book talk on this book for our English Department.
Wilhelm's book is full of various methods; some were great reminders; some I chose to utilize immediately, including Silent Discussion Thread and Radio-Show Dram Technique. The first asked each member of a group to respond to a question with evidence and then continue to pass until it returned to the owner. (This, then becomes an excellent source of evidence for a paragraph.) The second required the students to adopt character personas, develop questions based on that character, and call them in to the "radio station." Mine was named ABCD 123.4...:)
More of the questioning schemes I will use, especially reQuest, Questioning Circles, and Hillock's Questioning Hierarchy, all for which Wilhelm provided examples.
The epiphany for me? As I shared with my department, I have become arrogant in my ways, thinking that after 23 years of teaching that I can just walk in and make up discussion starters "off the cuff," so to speak. No. No, I can't. Good questions take time; they take thinking, yet, if used correctly, result in the students thinking deeper than ever before and in the teacher appearing to do little in the classroom, for at that point, she simply is a witness to the minds at work. Now, that is a good thing.
This was a good experience for me...reading, implementing, presenting. This, I encourage! This, I will do again next month with an already selected book...this time to the faculty.
Happy reading!
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