The Importance of Questions

I know how important it is to ask questions. I know this deep in my bones. This week brought a couple of reminders of how important questions can be.

The first took place during a parent conference this week. I teach in a school where many of the parents do not ask questions. They show up at the conference, show a great deal of respect, or sometimes disengagement. I chalk up the latter to a mindset: “School was a difficult and painful place for me and I want to just get out of here.” They most often listen passively to what I have to say. My inquiry of, “Is there anything you are concerned about or anything you would like me to know about your child?” is often met with, “No, everything is fine.” Sometimes I get, “I’d like him to read more,” or, “I know she has to work harder.” We don’t get very deep. I used to work at the other half of my school which is a magnet school. The parents in my twenty-some years of conferences there had lots of questions. Demanding, concerned, sometimes even confrontational.

The tough questions made me a better teacher. Even if I knew the concern was baseless or exaggerated, at its root lied a grain of truth that, if paid attention to, brought me to a better understanding of how to teach that child. Self-reflection is a healthy and necessary part of teaching. We know this. But sometimes I hear teachers complain about parents and their hard questions without seeing the gift it can offer.

This week a parent’s inquiry brought me to the surprising revelation that I need to pay more attention to her son’s contributions in class. I was frustrated that I didn’t have a clear answer for her, and I told her I would do a better job of paying attention to him. I am thankful for her tough question and it got me to thinking about how much I miss the challenge of demanding and inquiring parents. If you work with a population of children whose parents are often unable to advocate for their children, it is easy to become complacent. You have to form the habit of asking the tough questions of yourself.

Which leads me to reminder number two. I have been frustrated with my inability to help one of my students get his thoughts onto the page. He listens attentively during read aloud and has significant ideas to contribute, but writing it down proves extremely difficult. He and I played around with Dragon Dictation and another app I found but the iPad kept crashing and we couldn’t figure out how to get the text off the app and onto paper. And remember, 32 other students were waiting for/actively demanding my attention during the time each day he and I puzzled it out. And we had no real success to speak of. Argghh.

I woke up this morning and asked, “How can this be so flipping difficult? Why can’t I figure out a speech to text solution that will work in my classroom?” And I googled “Text to speech, elementary classroom” and found my answer. You probably already know this but Google Docs has a voice-typing tool that will do exactly what I want. EUREKA!

I am celebrating questions and inquiries that lead to more inquiries and sometimes answers. Thanks to Ruth Ayers for the reminder to celebrate. Lots more celebrations are here.

 

Write About What Fills Your Heart

A short piece I wrote entitled Write About What Fills Your Heart is on the #TeachWrite Blog today! Check it out here:

teachwritechat.blogspot.com/2018/01/write-…

In the Book Club

Today we were reading The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. A few days ago, when we first started reading the book, my students were wondering about how this story could possibly happen, since the robot is in the middle of the ocean on an island and yet “goes online.” They all agreed that would be impossible. “There is no way there would be wi-fi on that island,” L said with certainty.  

Like Vicki Vinton taught me to do in her wonderful What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making, I didn’t do much front loading for this book. I want them to experience the real questions that arise, the puzzles they get to solve, the uncertainty that readers need to carry for a while in a book. But today their questions, which had gotten numerous and frustrating for them, got me thinking that if I were reading this book and felt this way, I might seek out some answers. So I took them to Peter’s blog because I knew it would provide them with some of the answers. We read it out loud together, and a few paragraphs in T said with a big smile, “Oh here we go, we are getting to it now!” He was so excited to learn that this book was set in the future where middle-of-the-ocean wi-fi might be commonplace. Then we got to the part of the website that showed the books Peter read when researching for this book. He had pictures of the spines, “shelfies,” of the titles.

The room caught on fire! “HE READ HATCHET! I READ HATCHET!” yelled M.  J said, with her eyes wide open, “Oh my gosh, he read Charlotte’s Web! Wow! I am reading that RIGHT NOW!” They continued to identify titles they knew and loved. It was electric.

The legitimacy that this gave to my students, this idea that other people read the books we have in our classroom library caught me off guard. It confused me a bit at first. I think it’s another reminder of how far away from book literacy many of them live. While books have always made up, and continue to make up a large part of my life, for many of my students, books are things that only exist in school. Reading is not an activity they see people do at home. No one, outside of our classroom walls, talks about the book they just finished, or the book they want for their birthday, or the book that they can’t wait to read.

But now they know this cool author named Peter– they are in cahoots with him, reading his wonderful story– and he gave them the gift of “being in the club.” They are in his reading club. How simple, and yet how hugely critical.