One Connection, One Question, One Surprise
By: Ty Walkland
The first question we’re almost always asked after we finish a novel, poem, or short story is, “So, what did you think of the _______?” I don’t know about you, but I struggle to answer big questions like this. Where do I even start? I could say something about how a character reminded me of a relative I haven’t seen in a long while. I could say something about the prose, how it swept me up or how I struggled to stay focused. I could say something about how the _______ gave me a glimpse of some broken or beautiful condition of our world. Often, though, if I’m asked what I thought of that _______ I read, I’ll settle for a simple reply: “I liked it.” (Or I didn’t.)
Language arts teachers spend a lot of time crafting questions that will avoid simple answers like these (“I liked it, I didn’t”). Many of us learn in teacher’s college to avoid broad, open-ended inquiries, and so our questions sometimes swing wildly from the microcosmic—“What did this character say to so and so?”—and the macro—“What is the theme of the poem?” We want to know what meaning our students make of the novels, poems, and short stories we ask them to read. We want to know if they’ve read them at all, let alone discovered patterns and resonances across their experiences with other written forms and the world at large. And so we spend entire semesters—careers, even—scratching our heads, hoping that if we ask the right questions, we’ll elicit meaningful responses. I know, because I’ve spent hours dreaming up juicy queries, and even more time grading responses that tend to be flat, formulaic, and frightfully repetitive.
How, then, do we support our students to share their insights with us and their peers? We can give our students chapter questions and reading quizzes. We can ask them to draw plot graphs and character maps. We can instruct them to keep reader’s journals, to flag passages with post-it notes, to write long essays. All of these methods can be useful in the ELA classroom because, of course, no single strategy will work every time with every student. We teach people, not classes. But it can be tricky to strike a balance between specific and open-ended, offering enough scaffolds and structure so that students have some grit to push off from, but not so much that we stifle creative and critical thinking. Crucially, we want the learning to stay in our students’ hands, not ours.
A strategy we’ve found helpful in our work is this simple, three-pronged prompt: one connection, one question, one surprise. The kids and teachers in our project are often sharing responses to books they’ve read with people they’ve only just met. These prompts offer some common ground to spring from. Everyone—including us—completes the corresponding handout, writing as much or as little as we need so that we can participate in a conversation about the texts we’ve read. The handout asks us to make a connection between the text in question and something else we’ve read or watched, experienced, or noticed in the world (sometimes called text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world connections). It asks what took us by surprise as we read: a passage that changed our perspective, or perhaps a character who acted in a way we didn’t expect. Lastly, the handout asks us to pose a question—about that character who surprised us, maybe, or something that we might ask the author given the chance.
We’ve found that these flexible and open-ended prompts elicit a range of responses that then proliferate and sustain an hour-long conversation among relative strangers. These prompts help our students—kids and teachers alike—participate in small and large-group conversations about what they’ve read. Of course, you don’t have to wait until a book is “finished” before making connections, asking questions, and sharing surprises. The prompts could also be the start of a conversation shared between just student and teacher, or part of a record that students keep for themselves, returning as they map out those plot graphs and write their essays.
The point is these simple prompts move us toward what educational psychologists like to call “higher order thinking”—that is, beyond “who, what, where, and when?” and toward “why?” and “how?” and “why does it matter?” We find that students’ answers are much richer, the conversations more engaging, and the possibilities more open and varied. We spend less time figuring out what to ask, and more time listening to and learning from our students.