Question Types, and why I don't like QAR

I learned about QAR first through a colleague.  Then, I taught a series of lessons using the QAR framework to help students understand question types.  It came up in my Reading program a few times, and I read an article and some of Taffy Raphael's book about the subject.  So, I don't think I'm "dumb" about QAR.  Yet, when teaching it for the first time, I couldn't help but get the four question types mixed up.  And if I was doing it, you can believe that my students were doing it.  In my frustration, I asked myself, "Do they really need to know the differences among so many different question types?  Is this worth the teaching and re-teaching that it takes to clarify all of these differences?"

I think the answer is no.

Briefly, in QAR, there are four question types:

1. In the book, "Right there" questions - These are questions that you can point to in the text.  They are factual, short-answer questions.
2. In the book, "Think and Search" questions - These questions require connecting separate parts of text, making inferences across texts, or otherwise require more "searching" than "Right There" questions.
3. In my head, "On My Own" questions - These questions are prior knowledge, what you know before you read questions.
4. In my head, "Author and Me" questions - These questions connect what you already know to the author, or to bigger things (?).

I have a hard time explaining this because it doesn't feel logically consistent for me.  I don't think the distinction works or makes sense.  You are reading the book - you can't make connections without referring to the text and yourself.  The whole "Author and Me" question type makes no sense.  How do you connect without talking about the text?  When I explain this to students, I feel forced to make such incomprehensible statements as, "With Author and Me, you're talking about the text in general, not specifically, like you are in Right There and Think and Search."  But what about inferential questions about a character?  Is that Think and Search, or Author and Me if you are making broader inferences based on connections to other characters or real people?  It doesn't feel like it holds water to me.  

I don't like these fuzzy and artificial distinctions, but I like teaching the difference between "right there" and other question types.  I want my students to recognize and employ the difference.  So, the next step for me was teaching the difference between fact-based and more idea-based or more "out there" question types.  I tried teaching students to recognize fact-based questions, just as a general test-taking and comprehension strategy.  The problem with that approach was the fuzziness of the "out there," non-factual questions.  There are just too many things that fall under that umbrella, some of which are useful, and some of which are not.  

Enter the three question types.  I don't remember where I found this idea, but I think one of the clearest articulations of it comes from Tompkins.  Here's a passage from her book, Language Arts:

Questions can be divided into three levels: literal, inferential, and critical.  Literal or "on the page" questions have a single factual answer and can usually be answered with a few words or "yes" or "no."  When the questions refer to a story or other book that students are reading, the answers are directly stated in the text.  The second level of questions is inferential or "between the lines."  To answer these questions, students synthesize information and form interpretations using both their background knowledge and clues in the text.  The answers are implicitly stated in the text.  The third, most complex level of questioning is critical or "beyond the page."  These questions are open-ended.  They require students to go beyond the text and think creatively and abstractly about global ideas, issues, and concerns.  At this level, students apply information, make connections, evaluate and value the text, and express opinions.  (p. 349)

I think these three question levels do everything that distinctions among question types should.  There are clear and important differences among all three question types, and understanding the differences is much easier and much more valuable.  I want students to be able to answer factual questions, but I also want them to see these as less valuable than either of the other two.  And I would like them to be using the third question type to be thinking about how they can use what they read, or how adults use what they read.  

This three-level question framework also more easily lends itself to analogy and graphic organizers.  I've seen some good tree organizers - factual questions are the roots, inferential questions are the trunk and branches, and critical questions are the leaves.  

Let me try some examples with my old standby, Harry Potter:

Literal - What are the names of Harry's parents?

Inferential - Why is Hogwarts the only school of magic in Great Britain?

Critical - What message does the series try to support about discrimination and prejudice?

I think this approach is much more useful and much clearer for students, and I think it also establishes a clear hierarchy of complexity and difficulty.  I think we want students to work toward critical questions, and I think teaching them this framework helps them see that as a useful goal.  

Using verse novels in the classroom

I don't know how much attention these things are getting anymore.  I think the trend has slowed a bit, but it doesn't seem like it was that long ago that YA/MG novels in verse, like Crank by Ellen Hopkins or Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, were getting a lot of attention from teachers and students alike.  (And of course, Love that Dog is a classic of this type, though it's probably young for most of my seventh graders.)

I enjoy books written in verse, and not just because they are often quick reads (although that is a major selling point).  I enjoy poetry, of course, and reading a verse novel is a nice blend of two of my favorite things (though I could probably read a bit more poetry these days).  

This format also fits novels about emotional struggle and loss very well, and many of the best verse novels I've read are about trauma.  Shark Girl, probably the first YA novel that I read that was written in verse, is about a young woman whose arm is bitten off by a shark.  This is traumatic enough, but she is also an accomplished young artist who doesn't think she can pursue her dream anymore.  That combination - physical suffering and potential loss of identity - became a resonant, emotionally-dense narrative that I was able to read in less than two hours.  

I haven't read every verse novel that I've heard of.  I read Crank and was disappointed.  It wasn't as searing as I had hoped, and felt predictable.  Here's a short list of my favorite verse novels:

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanha Lai

Shark Girl by Kelley Bingham

All the Lovely Pieces by Ann E. Burg

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse

True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy

By the River by Steven Herrick

There are a lot of other great titles on a list I found here, in case you want to look for more.  The titles above I have read and enjoyed.

The best part about novels in verse is that they can be very motivating for struggling readers.  I've had success using Shark Girl, Out of the Dust, and All the Broken Pieces in the classroom.  Kids might be tempted to read them too quickly, though, so they have to be reminded to pay attention and listen for things that don't sound right, or that might be misleading or confusing.  

I'm also surprised to find several lists of "verse novels" include House on Mango Street.  I love this book, and I love teaching this book, but I suppose I never thought of it as a "verse novel."  It's very poetic, but I'm not sure that I buy into that - it's hard to "see" the poetry here, and opening that door makes the distinction much harder to make.  

More about Middle-School Guided Reading

I was able to observe another middle-school (7th grade) teacher using the Guided Reading structure, and we talked a little bit about methods that are effective for this age group.  

I should point out at this point that I don't want to pretend to be the best at using Guided Reading.  There are things about the strategy that I don't like, and that I struggle with.  It takes a significant amount of prep time to start, for example.  If it weren't so effective, and if the kids didn't enjoy the change so much, I might not use it at all.  But those are powerful motivators for teachers.  I also struggle with re-using old curriculum.  I like to try new things, sometimes to a fault, and I sometimes abandon old ideas (like old stations) merely because I think I have a better idea.  So, I end up experimenting a lot, instead of using "tried-and-true" stations.  

I'm thinking through the last part of the year, now that we're in "testing mode."  I think that Guided Reading is a nice, engaging strategy for the "home stretch," and there are a lot of fun things kids can do as part of this that are still effective and yield results.  But I also really want to push more writing.  I haven't done enough Writing Workshop this year, and I'm hoping to play around with ways to combine the two.  

So, as I dig through my professional resources (I found a book by Katie Wood Ray that I'm going to look through for new perspectives on workshop), and I refine some of the things that I've already done, I'm looking at how to make the most of Guided Reading.  

The teacher that I observed didn't do traditional "rotations."  Instead of a "you go here at this time" rotation, as I've seen in elementary school, or the "get your materials and return to your seat to work on this at this time" structure that I usually use, she establishes the stations and then allows kids to work on the various stations at their own pace.  The only timed and structured station, really, is the teacher station.  There is a fixed group of kids ("fixed" as in set by the teacher, according to a specific purpose) who meet with the teacher for a reasonable chunk of time (15-20 minutes or so), then are dismissed to continue working on stations.  

There are positives and negatives to this way of doing things:

POSITIVE - 

• Kids have more flexibility to follow their interests and work at their own pace.  (More choice) 
• Less troublesome if kids are absent or pulled out for something
• Less set-up time for rotations and stations (don't have to create a huge, detailed chart and keep posted)
• Can create an incentive to finish early through engaging "early finishers" activities, like games or "free time" activities

NEGATIVE - 

• Need to monitor stations and "sharing" to avoid crowding or "I was there first!" disputes
• Less immediate accountability for off-task or misbehaving kids who might not want to do all of the stations 
• Less control over personality clashes and kids who might work better away from each other

Most of the negatives involve management issues.  It's much easier to lose control in this kind of an environment, so a teacher who attempts this approach will have to feel comfortable trusting his/her kids with this kind of freedom.  It allows choice, but it also might allow conflict over popular choices.  It would also take some teaching and some control over conflict resolution.  During the observation I was doing, for example, some kids were watching videos on a portable DVD player.  There just wasn't enough room for everyone to watch at the same time.  Similarly, there was an iPod with a song and some headphones that kids were supposed to listen to (and summarize).  There just weren't enough headphones for everyone to do this at once.  It helps when all the stations are reasonably "cool," of course.  But I can still see that it takes teaching - or some fabulous students, though I think some teaching would have to be involved - to get kids to understand this kind of procedure.  

I like this format, and I like the kind of feedback it provides me about the stations and about the students.  I think that kids enjoy having a say in what goes into the stations, and I really think it might be fun to invite kids to contribute to a "music" station, for example, since I know so little about contemporary music (though I'm trying).  

I'll be thinking about this over the next few weeks, and I'll try to post some more about how I'm melding (love the Star Trek reference) Writing Workshop and Guided Reading.  

Inquiry in the Reading/Writing Classroom - Units of Study

Last year, I was looking around for ways to use more inquiry in my Reading/Writing class.  I was in love with the idea as a content-area (science and social studies) teacher, and I wanted to use it more.  

It helped that I attended a Summer Leadership Institute with the Illinois Writing Project.  I met several teachers from other schools, and I found that another school had begun using Study Driven, a book by Katie Wood Ray.  The book introduces a way of teaching reading and writing in related ways, as part of a focused, intensive study of ("immersion" in) a specific genre.  

Let me explain by example.  Let's say that you choose to study memoir.  You flood the students with examples of memoir, as many as you can find that are appropriately leveled and (hopefully) engaging.  After they have read and studied several examples, you ask them to notice or discover what these texts have in common.  You articulate these common features, and you talk about the ways that writers can choose to adhere to these conventions or not, but that generally a genre will follow a certain set of conventions.  Memoir, for example, is typically told in first person and focuses on significant events in a person's life.  It is tied to specific contexts and settings, often to specific objects or people.  It is almost always intensely localized or focused on the minute details of the past.  

This is the inquiry part.  You are focusing students on a specific line of inquiry, and you are asking the big questions, but students are discovering the nuances of the answers.  Eventually, the goal would be to encourage them to branch out on their own, discover and analyze their own notion of genre, or even start to formulate an emerging genre (very cool!).  The end product, however, is for them to create a text that fits the genre they are studying.  

So, students are buried in examples or models of a genre, asked to study them closely, articulate the conventions of that genre as a result of that study, and then create a text that adheres to those conventions.  The text is created under the conditions of a typical writing workshop, with students choosing the particulars of how they will create the text and allowed to work at their own pace in an environment where they are supported and given time to compose and revise.  

The results were impressive.  Partly because I supported this with journals, and partly because I swamped them with models - all directed toward a specific, up-front objective - my students created some of the best memoir I have seen from 7th graders.  I read so many good examples that it was overwhelming.  

Part of the success comes from the choice of genre.  You can't study a genre like political satire or medieval mystery plays in a middle-school classroom.  You need good examples that students can connect to, and you need to be able to help them focus topics and sustain effort over time.  Many of my students were writing longer texts than they had ever written before.  And not every student wrote great stuff or tried their hardest.  That's something I will continue to work on, but it was not a Hollywood movie or a fairy tale, so it wasn't 100%.  But it was much closer than I have ever been before.  I was also successful with the "scary story" genre, and with shorter examples like the 55-word story.  (I found a book of examples of this - the number of words is not important, as long as they are forced to fit that example.  Like haiku, forcing them to shape their thinking into a certain conventional container can be challenging and fun.)  Odes also worked well - mostly because of examples from Pablo Neruda and past students.  We also had fun (perhaps a little too much) with tweets as a genre.

I'm working on units based on jokes, narrative nonfiction with "tension" (a concept from Donald Murray), tweets (a more organized version), and some kind of persuasive text (still searching for a good, authentic genre appropriate for this developmental level with engaging models of appropriate length).  

I was planning to also discuss inquiry and the teaching of grammar, but I'll have to post about that later.  

Middle-School Guided Reading

I'm going to talk a little bit about Guided Reading, an old teaching model that has been used for years in elementary classrooms.  The basic premise is homogeneous groups, working with the teacher, while the rest of the class is working in "stations."

Here are some links to pages about Guided Reading:

Short Summary of the Strategy from Saskatoon Public Schools

Scholastic Publication on Research base for Guided Reading

Overview of Guided Reading from Michigan State University

Here's a quote from the last link (Michigan State University):

What are the Other Students Doing While I’m Teaching Reading Groups? 

There are a variety of options. Students could be reading independently or in small Literature Circles / Book Clubs. Or they could be working in center activities related to reading. Whichever you choose, it is a routine that needs to be taught well in the first few weeks of school in order to be successful.

To me, this sounds a lot like "As long as they're busy, it doesn't much matter."  This is the biggest criticism of Guided Reading as a whole, in my opinion.  I don't think that most teachers do this, but it would be easy to just give the rest of the class busy-work, and focus on the "teacher group."  As long as students were diligently working on the "busy-work," it wouldn't seem to matter much, would it?

There are criteria to keep in mind for stations to be effective:

1. Station work has to be independent work, so it can't be new material or too challenging, or students won't be able to do it without interrupting the teacher (which is bad).  So keep it relatively easy.
2. The work must also be engaging enough to keep students focused for the duration of the station, usually at least 20 minutes.  
3. Some assessment of this station work must occur, and must occur consistently, or students won't put any serious effort into completing it.  

The challenge with middle school students is that they are both less patient and more perceptive than typical elementary students with work that lacks a clear sense of purpose.  For example, unless you have built value into silent reading (or if you have a class full of focused readers, a rarity in middle school), you probably won't be able to get a group of students to focus on reading independently for any length of time with so much else going on in the room, and without the direct observation of the teacher.  Designing a good station can take a lot of time, and it often produces material from the students that requires additional time to read and respond to.  

So, in a middle-school setting, what do you need to do to make this work?  Here are some things that my co-workers and I have found (or have learned from others):

• Create a consistent structure for students to use in the station, and follow it for a long time.  For example, use a Making Words book for a vocabulary station, and have students complete a vocabulary activity several times over several weeks using different words.  
• Pre-teach station activities as much as you can, so that students are comfortable with the work before they attempt to complete it in the stations.  
• Students often enjoy the stations if there is a chance to work with peers, and adding even a small element of "fun" increases the effectiveness enormously.  Having students analyze picture books, for example, can be very effective.  
• Grade only one station, but don't let students know in advance which station will be graded.  
• Practice the procedures as much as possible early in the school year, and follow them consistently.  Follow the same procedure for grouping and rotations.  Groups should change (flexible grouping is important), but the way that you tell the students what group they are in and what they are doing should stay the same.  I also use a timer and a signal to announce a change in rotation (a $5 Wal-Mart bicycle horn).  
• Make sure that you have a procedure for early finishers.  
• Be creative with the stations.  Nonfiction reading, for example, can be a very cool station.  We had success with material from our science books that we never managed to get to - the books were readily available, familiar to the students, and reasonably engaging.  

I'm sure I will think of more to say here, and I'm not pretending to be an expert on guided reading in middle school.  But if you're curious or considering using it in the upper grades, it's a powerful instructional strategy when used well.  It just takes a lot of prep time.