H OW TO ASK GOOD QUESTIONS ! -or- How to ask good questions???

T HREE 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

L EVEL ONE : I DENTIFYING 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?

L EVEL T WO : P ROCESSING 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?

L EVEL T HREE : E VALUATING 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”?

H OW 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.

Y OUR 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!

O NE 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.

Y OUR 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.