The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Inquiry

Peanut butter and jelly. John and Yoko. Hayrides and Claritin. Reading and inquiry. Some things just go together well.

Effective readers practice inquiry all the time, perhaps not even aware they're doing so. We make predictions. We pose questions in our heads. We challenge an author's basic assumptions. We examine the validity of claims. We judge based on self-created standards of good and bad or effective and ineffective. We connect our reading to our own lives, to the world around us, and to other things we have read.

Students who struggle with reading often accept what they read at face value and don't dare to engage with the text at a higher level. It's our job as teachers to hold their hands as they wade into the waters of inquiry so they can eventually swim on their own.

Inquiry connects to the act of reading before, during, and after the reading itself occurs.

Before reading, teachers can pose an open-ended question or scenario for students to discuss to make their minds and/or hearts receptive to what they're about to read:

What would happen if you had to leave your family and survive on your own?
Which is better: a life without stress or a life with some stress? Why?
What makes a good scary story?
What are all the things in your possession that are made from plants?
How important are material possessions in achieving popularity?

Questions like these get students thinking about a topic and prepare them for some reading that connects in some way to the subject.

During the reading itself, students can be encouraged to interact with the text by writing their own questions in the margins or on sticky notes. Or ask them to keep track of the thinking they're doing as they read and share that with the class afterwards. Your students may also benefit from hearing you do a Read-Aloud/Think-Aloud in which you read the text to them and comment aloud about the things you're thinking and questioning as you read. Letting them witness a model of what's going on in an effective reader's head helps your students fill their toolboxes with strategies they can use as they read independently.

After reading, your options for inquiry are plentiful. I'm always a champion for using Costa's Levels of Thinking to compose questions for further discussion. Your students will quickly find that Level One questions (the ones with right answers) don't generate much discussion, but they may be essential questions to ask to check for literal understanding. Also, I like to remind students that if a discussion is boring after they wrote the questions, that's their fault. Next time, they should work to come up with some questions worth discussing. For optimal pairing with the reading, remind students to write questions that require revisiting the text to support an answer.

I have had good luck asking students to write questions they'd like to ask the author of the text. If the author is alive and reachable via social media or e-mail, you might have fun selecting the best questions from your class and asking the author directly. Getting a response from a living writer makes the learning come alive and prompts student interest in the text. To "tech up" your classroom, consider using a website like Tricider to allow students to comment or vote on one another's questions to select the best ones.

For general inquiry-based discussions after reading, try circling up the chairs for a Socratic Seminar over the text using student-generated questions. You can find scads of resources to help you conduct Socratic Seminars on the internet, the AVID website, and YouTube. Remember that the purpose of a Socratic Seminar is to foster genuine collaborative discussion to deepen the class's understanding of what they read. If the topic of the reading lends itself to a debate format, consider a Philosophical Chairs discussion instead. Whatever you do, make sure you leave time to debrief the process of the discussion itself at the end; that's the only way to improve the quality of future discussions.

One of the top skills employers seek in management-level employees is the ability to ask questions. By bringing inquiry to the forefront of your classroom, you're not only preparing your students for the rigors of the work world but you're also handing them the key to increased reading effectiveness and the ability to learn on their own. What could be more important than that?