Sage Rebuehr

Reading Reflection #3

Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry by Jeffrey Wilhelm

Chapter 5 & 6

In these chapters we got to the meat of inquiry.  Wilhelm explains questioning schemes “to help connect ideas from lesson to lesson and text to text, so that each day’s activities are threaded together, like beads on a necklace.” He discusses ReQuest, Question Answer Relationships (QAR), questioning circles, authorial reading, questioning the Author (QtA), and Hillock’s hierarchy of questions.  That’s a lot of questions.  The goal is to understand that comprehension is the first step in reading.  Each of these frameworks brings to the surface the various levels of meaning.  They attempt to show the various levels of meaning readers create as they read.

In various forms, I have tried to use several of these schemes in my teaching, but I usually became frustrated and abandoned them.  QAR is the one I use most and I really enjoyed seeing how Wilhelm adapts, modifies, and uses it in his classroom.  I always want to jump right in and forgot to scaffold the learning as must as I do.  As I continued reading, I was thinking “Gosh, do we really need four different ways to talk about different types of questions?”  I am thinking it is best to keep the terminology consistent and simple so the students will grasp it.  I did really like, however, when he introduced Hillock’s 7 levels of questions.  It would be a great tool to use as a teacher to determine where student’s comprehension stalls (probably at level 4 or 5) and how to push them to high level thinking. 

As a discussion protocol, we did “It Says – I Say – And So”.  We picked passages from the reading for “It Says” and then added our thinking in the next two columns.  I found myself making lots of connections and agreements with the text and I found it difficult to complete the “And So” part.