How to ask good questions!

1. How to ask good questions! -or- How to ask good questions???

2. Three levels of questioning • One way to think of questions and how to ask them, is to consider on what level it asks you or the person answering it to think. • There are three levels that a question could be at: • Level one: Identifying information • Level two: Processing information • Level three: Evaluating information

3. Level one: Identifying information • These kinds of questions are questions that ask the answerer to find, list, select, or otherwise identify information. • If you can actually point to an answer in the book or article, it’s a level one question. Examples: • Where was Little Red Riding Hood going when she entered the forest? • What happened when the woodsman entered the hut and found the wolf?

4. Level Two: Processing information • These kinds of questions are questions that ask the answerer to INFER something from the text. • You can’t point directly to these answers, but you could offer some evidence to justify your answer (and some answers will be “better” answers than others). Examples: • Why does Little Red Riding Hood ask her “grandmother” so many questions when she enters the cottage? • Does the woodsman have a personal stake in rescuing Red Riding Hood, or is he just being kind?

5. Level Three: Evaluating information • These kinds of questions are questions that ask the answerer to evaluate or generalize the implications of what the text is saying. • Here you think about the implications of the information in a larger context. Examples: • Is it in the nature of fairy tales for the woman to need to be rescued? • Is the dark forest operating as a symbol to children of the dangers of the unknown? • What does it mean to live “happily ever after”?

6. How to mix the levels • If you are constructing questions or are asking yourself questions as you read, you want to make sure you are asking a good MIX of question types • If you are hovering on level one all the time, you will never understand the information more deeply than just being able to point to where it says things. • If you are always asking questions at level three, you might miss important information or inferences the author is making, and misunderstand the text.

7. Your job as a questioner • As you are reading, you should be asking yourself level 1 and maybe a few level 2 questions. • After you are done reading, you should ask yourself some level 2 questions, and maybe one or two level 3 questions. • As you are discussing the reading, you should be asking level 2 and level 3 questions only!

8. One additional check on the quality of your questions… • Level 1 questions are the only kinds of questions that have a definitive RIGHT and WRONG answer. • It will always be wrong that Riding Hood’s hat was blue. • Level 2 and 3 questions need to be open-ended, in the sense that they should not have a DEFINITIVE answer. • The question “What are the woodsman’s motives for rescuing Red Riding Hood?” can have multiple answers: • I can justify with evidence from the story that the woodsman only rescued Riding Hood because he wants to marry her. • Or I can justify with evidence from the story that he is just doing it because he dislikes wolves. • I can’t say it’s because aliens took over his body – there’s no evidence for that.

9. Your task • You have 5 minutes to look back over your short story and to write 3 questions to ask your reading circles during your discussion. • If your story was complex and hard to understand, write a level 1 question that might help make things clearer. • If your story was pretty straightforward as to what happened, write questions that are only at levels 2 and 3. • Identify which level each of your questions is at. • I will come to confirm or deny the levels of your questions.