tennessee is leading the way using questions to structure a research project

They actually worked on the project while I was absent yesterday!  And, Nyrissa told me today: "Hold on Mr. Welch, I'm not ready to publish.  I need to revise still."  I'm so impressed with their motivation and high expectations they have for themselves.  That Nyrissa would be self-motivated to revise is a new phenomenon indeed! 

So, going back to the first day this all started, we'd been reading about the Chicago Fire and I wanted them to do a sort of research project to synthesize what they'd learned.  I had them generate and prioritize questions that they thought were important about the Chicago Fire.  I was honestly not that impressed with a lot of them.  They felt really random, and I know that it's bad to say because whether the questions I wanted to see or not, they are authentic student questions.  I guess my biggest problem with them is that they didn't reveal rich comprehension of the text, which in a sense is good because its feedback that tells me we need to review their comprehension of text.  But I'm interested in using a questioning ladder that helps them generate their questions in a more methodical, "from the ground-up" manner.  I had them focus on asking "remembering" and "understanding" questions first.  We generated a few together, I prompted them to think of these questions as questions people would ask just to get to know and understand some basic facts and details about the Chicago Fire.  Then I had them focus on asking "applying" and "analyzing" questions.  I prompted them to generate these questions by thinking about what questions people might have about why events happened the way they did.  Then I had them focus on generating "creating" and "evaluating" questions. 

This process was really helpful as a way to review and build knowledge together, it was effective because we established the fundamental knowledge points first, and then built from there to the places where students might infer and draw conclusions.  There analyzing questions were much richer and more meaningful because I think they connected to fundamental aspects of the Chicago Fire, not obscure or less germane ones.

Addendum: at the end of our guided reading session today Malik asked me if we're going to do this with each one of our books, I said why, do you want to?  and he said yes.  He explained: "because it's fun.  you get to work in a group with a lot of people that work together. and it's challenging" why?  "it's challenging because everyone has to cooperate and be active citizens."  Dameko: "I can add something.  in the end you have to chose if you want take your partners thinking and put it in your writing and its hard cuz you don't want them to feel bad if you didn't put it in your writing."

 I'm also using guided reading group Tennessee to mentor guided reading group Texas with the research process.