Wilhelm+Chapter+5

Reading Between and Beyond the Lines:

Using Questioning Schemes to Promote Inquiry - Oriented Reading

"Books without connection to knowledge of life are useless.... for what should books teach but the art of living?" - Samuel Johnson

Personal connections, feeling and relating, deepening understanding and applying text and information to the real world. Isn't this what we aim to do or or should aim to do with all of our students? Our purpose for reading about topics should be that students take what we learn in class in to the real world and apply it to enhance or enlighten their personal lives. "We should sequence our teaching so that all the class's reading, talking and thinking-all endeavors-progress toward application" (Wilhelm, 2007, p. 112). The goal is to help students have such an understanding of topics that they can take the information and apply it, change it or reorganize it into a new and unique "product" whether that be an understanding, behavior, or new and improved form of transportation. Teachers help students take what they know about a topic, learn more about the topic, and gain a more enlightened understanding. Most importantly, topics must be relevant to the students we are trying to reach. "You've got to hit them where they live" (Wilhelm, 2007, p.112)

Using Questioning Schemes to Organize Teaching and Learning

**Questioning schemes** help connect our learning by linking "lesson to lesson and test to text", this way all activities work together to create a new level of understanding. Schemes support "meaningful making" based on what is being read through discussion, thinking, and reading. The ability to recognize patterns, connections, and themes and connect them to uses in life is a "vital intellectual skill" and the "essence of inquiry". "To inquire is to search for patterns and infer their significance" (Wilhelm, 2007, p.113). Make sure to draw students' attention to the fact that "real-life" inquirers use pattern analysis in all types of jobs from scientists to writers.

Take a look at the "Arc of Inquiry "

Schemes help students : - Connect life experiences and their studies. - Identify patterns and relationships and grasp their importance. - Look at ideas from a variety of perspectives. - Inquire about single text and multiple text activities. - Stay on course in order to move their understanding from what they knew in the past, to new learning in the present, to what they might know in the future.

The Quality Education Modelis a great visual as to how students learn. It fits nicely with Wilhelm's Inquiry method.

Let's take a look at reQuest, QAR, and Questioning Circles - three questioning schemes that support learning in this fashion.

ReQuest

**ReQuest** is a questioning scheme that helps students link “school knowledge” to the real world. It requires them to find relationships between ideas and explain them. ReQuest (Manzo, 1969) was the first questioning scheme to help students develop “an active, inquiring attitude.”

The name reQuest comes from the idea that teachers will “re-question” students to encourage them to expand their thinking. Making the connections between content learning and higher order deductive reasoning allows students to understand and remember the concepts beyond the “testing window.” Older students especially demand an answer to the age-old question, "What does this have to do with my life?"

According to A.V. Manzo (1969), “It is important that the strategy be modeled by the teacher using each genre.” Here is a link to Learning Point Associates, where more information is available regarding several of the Literacy Strategies addressed in the Wilhelm text. Just Read Now is another website which provides insights into how the reQuest strategy works. The Reading Recovery website has the following PDF document available as well.

Three Level Reading Guide



The **Three-Level Reading Guide** follows the ReQuest scheme.
 * On the lines: directly stated facts
 * Between the lines:make connections between details and text
 * Beyond the lines: extend your thinking beyond the text, infer

Students respond to the questions prior to reading for frontloading. This guide will help activate background knowledge and give students an idea of what key points they should be focusing on. Students then refer back to the guide after reading to update their knowledge on the given topic.

This type of learning requires much discussion and modeling to illustrate the different levels of questioning. Teachers should model this type of questioning guide three or four times in order for students to be able to perform independently.

After modeling, you need to create a panel of experts. Gather a group of students to compose questions for the class and work with this group. This helps students learn to classify and formulate each question type. Next, have groups work independently to create the guide. Finally, students will be able to internalize the scheme and work independently.

The purpose here is "to provide students with assisted practice naming the different reading moves and question types and the work these kinds of questions do" (Wilhelm, 2007, p. 119).

Visit the following websites for more information on Three Level Reading Guides and to view some examples, and a three-level reading guide example on climate change (scroll down to page 20, number 9).

QAR Question - Answer Relationship

==== **Question-Answer Relationship (QAR)** is a method of questioning that can be used in virtually any subject area and for all ages to increase comprehension and help students understand the relationship between questions and answers. There are four basic types of questions that are broken down into two categories. The first category is “In the Text Questions”. These questions include ‘right there’ questions, which are questions that call for students to find the place in the text where the question is answered. This category also includes ‘think and search" ==== questions, which involve the reader looking for details and thinking about how those details are related. The second category of questions is called “In My Head Questions”. This category includes 'author and me’ questions, which are inferential questions that require the student to combine details from the text with their own experiences. The second type of question in this category is ‘on my own’. These inquiry-like questions require the reader to evaluate and apply knowledge, although students do not necessarily need to use details from the text to answer them.

==== Wilhelm (2007) writes about using QAR with novels and as a review game as a couple examples of classroom application. To use QAR with novels, he suggests using a gradual release model by first giving the students questions of each type and eventually having students come up with and answer their own questions. Reviewing a chapter or section of the text is also a great way to incorporate the QAR questioning scheme. Simply have small groups create questions that fit with the QAR types. Next, have the first group ask a question while another group answers the question, classifies the type of question, and shows how they arrived at the answer to earn a point. If the group does not correctly do these things, the next group has a chance to earn a point. It is easy to see how the QAR technique can be used with many subject areas and across different grade levels. Check out this guide to using the QAR technique, complete with task sheets to use in your classroom. You can also watch this video that demonstrates how to use QAR. ====

Questioning Circles

**[|Questioning Circles]** are similar to ReQuest and QAR in that they all emphasize different resources students must use to understand, interpret, and evaluate. This strategy enables students to acquire an understanding of a text to further understand a larger concept. Unlike ReQuest and QAR, Questioning Circles emphasize students' use of connections between information from a text and personal experiences to form a true understanding of the inquiry topic. Asking "pure" questions (questions that rely on one source of information - reader, text, or world knowledge) as opposed to "shaded" questions (questions that are answered using a combination of resources - text/reader, reader/world, or text/world) is strongly encouraged. "Dense" questions (questions that combine all three sources - text/reader/world) are asked by the students and organize the inquiry (Wilhelm, 2007).

Each of the schemes described above are extremely powerful in the inquiry process. ReQuest, Three Level Reading Guides, QAR, and Questioning Circles all focus on the inquiry process and, therefore, guide students to make connections, evaluate information critically, and apply their knowledge to the world in a productive and valuable manner. These schemes also illustrate how expert comprehensive reading is associated with the inquiry process and how information is interconnected. In order to create an understanding of information, students need knowledge of purpose as well as how to access, develop, interconnect, structure, and apply the information in a way that is meaningful to their lives. Students must become inquirers. These schemes are tools that guide students to become inquirers.

**"To help our students become inquirers is to help them become more powerful learners and people."** (Wilhelm, 2007).

References

Manzo, A. V. (1969). The ReQuest procedure. The Journal of Reading, 13(2), 123-126.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey. (2007) Engaging Readers & Writers With Inquiry. New York: Pearson.