That’s a Good Question.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that it takes me years to come up with a good question for a discussion over a literary text. 

Often, it takes me three times teaching a poem (or any other genre) to know “What’s a good question to ask students to really get discussion going?”

But when I finally do find that question—ohhhh, it is so satisfying.  It feels like I’ve found the skeleton key to a literary text, and now we can all explore its nooks and crannies.

Leading discussion (as I repeat ad infinitum) is, to me, both the most important and the most difficult activity in the English classroom.

As discussion leader (and I do think you need a leader), the teacher has to both know the text very well, know “what people talk about when they talk about this text,” and listen to student comments and somehow respond to each point made without digressing (too much) or losing sight of “why we are having this discussion in the first place.”

I think there’s a basic hierarchy of questions that I try to climb in every classroom discussion.

1.        Ground-Floor Questions:

You have to start on the ground floor—meaning, with granular, specific, concrete questions about the literal facts or meanings of the text.  These questions aren’t always the most fun, but you have to start somewhere.  They are dangerously close to the worst questions a teacher can ask—the dreaded “Guess What the Teacher is Thinking” Question.

2.        Student Response Questions:

After “the facts” have been established, I try to shift gears into student’s emotional response to the text.  (One of my mottos as a teacher is to “always begin with student response”).  What did y’all think of X?  How did Y make you feel?  Ultimately, I want students to combine their emotional reaction to the text with an intellectual appreciation of it, but (as E. E. Cummings said) “since feeling is first,” I begin there.  Plus—y’ know—teenagers.  Where else am I gonna start?

3.        Authorial Intent Questions:

Once I get a feel for how the students feel about a text, I try to get us to consider what the author is trying to “do to us” or make us think about.  I mean, it is an English class, and we want to be better readers—so figuring out the author’s goals can help us evaluate the author’s success in achieving those goals within us.

4.        Evaluating Authorial Intent:

So, did the author accomplish his or her goals for this text?  Does the text please you?  Does the text intrigue you?  Has the text gotten you to think harder about a certain topic or issue?

5.        The Big Question(s):

What “Big Question” is the text getting us to ask?  What topic does it want us to consider (or reconsider)?  Now we’re getting somewhere—now, we’re cooking with gas. 

6.        What do you think the answer to that big question is?

And here is where I wanted to be the whole time.  While not every literary text is going to present us with an ethical dilemma or a philosophical problem, a heckuva lot of them do—and that’s when I find the classroom truly comes alive because we are no longer just talking about literature, we are talking about our lives.  Something is actually at stake.

This list of questions climbing up the Ladder of Abstraction looks like an easy and effective formula. Sometimes it works like a charm, but most days it’s a more like a chaotic jungle gym than anything else, but that’s what makes the English classroom exciting.  You start on the ground floor, and—if you’re open to it—you never know where you might end up.  That’s the English classroom at its best.