Questioning Strategies

I always felt like my teachers in high school had amazing questions for me as I sat through their lectures. If I said one thing, I had to be prepared for the retort or for one of my classmates to respond to what I had said. But, we were prepared, our teachers knew how to question us in order for us to think deeper. I remember the first time I had ever realized just how deep we were getting was when I had done a socratic seminar after we had read Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” This format was terrifying at first because it was so student driven, but in the end it was for the best in getting us to think about how to read a text and analyze it deeper. 

A socratic seminar requires students to have read and annotated a text to their fullest extent. Questioning what they don’t understand, what they want to know, what their classmates feel, etc. The student’s jobs are to not just stop at the initial reading of a text. Then, it is up to the students to question each other and to not debate with each other, but to have a discussion. Your job as a teacher is to prepare students for this by creating a classroom environment that allows students to feel comfortable with talking to one another. It is not about trying to be the loudest in the room, it is about making sure that everyone had a voice at the end. Every student should be able to speak and discuss the topic at hand and be able to give some sort of opinion or idea.

As a teacher, your job is set up sample questions for students to take and run off with:

Who has a different perspective? Who has not yet had a chance to speak? Where do you find evidence for that in the text? Can you clarify what you mean by that? These questions give students an idea of how to continue a conversation on a text without just stopping at “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” Students become responsible for the answers they give. And the preparation leading up to the socratic seminar should be long and important, giving students time to prepare their own questions, and read through the text multiple times so that they can come up with some understanding. This allows students to become comfortable with what they are saying, because they feel so prepared to discuss something they know so well. Overall, it gives you an opportunity to help students learn how to question their own thoughts and each other as well as prepare them for questions that you may ask in the future. It is great preparation for the rest of the school year and sets the tone of how texts should be analyzed.