7/3/10
QUESTIONING YOUR BOOK
The other day I began writing about teacher guides and how they can help get your book into schools. What I
neglected to mention, mainly because it is rather exstensive, is how to create them. Today, I am going to talk
about questions.
One thing every teacher needs when reading a novel with their class is a plethora of questions to ask to either
generate discussion, make the students think or check that they read the selection in the first place. Creating
these questions can be easy, but too many people stick with the last category and that can be a problem (I'll
explain why shortly). As I stated the other day in Teacher Guides, your overall goal is to make your guide
compatible with state teaching standards. They can be found HERE. As you will notice, there are a lot of them.
You don't have to hit on every one, but you can get through many just with your questions.
To make this easier for those who aren't teachers, I am going to explain this as simply as possible. So, any
teachers that do read this, please don't roll your eyes at it.
There are essentially three levels of questioning:
1) Basic Comprehension Questions - These are to check for understanding, and also to check if the student
actually read the story.
2) Thinking Questions - These are to make the students look deeper into the story and pull out information
that isn't freely given to them.
3) Open Ended Questions - These questions don't necessarily have a right or wrong answer, but will get the
students thinking. The students should have to back up their response with information from the story.
By far the easiest questions to create are the Basic Comprehension Questions. The questions are pretty
much correct or incorrect when responded to, and the student will only have to really skim through the
passage in order to get them correct. A question like this might be "What does Christine tell Sam at the
beginning of Chapter 1?" There is only one response, because she only tells him one thing. If the student
didn't understand, or more likely didn't read, they will get the question wrong. While it is necessary to include
them, you really don't want to have too many of them, because while it does check for comprehension, it
doesn't do much for learning. Which is why you want to stick more with the questions in categories two and
three.
For the other categories is where the standards mentioned earlier really come into play. As I said, the answers
for these questions won't be placed right in front of the students and they will need to look deeper into the
work to answer them. They can vary in difficulty from very easy, to incredibly difficult, but they must take at
least a sentence to answer (No "Yes or No" questions from here on out). For the first chapter of High School
Heroes, two of the questions I asked was this: "Identify one example of foreshadowing in this chapter" and
"Describe Christine's character." These aren't very hard questions, but it does do two things. First, it makes
the students think about what they have read. Two, it hits on two of the standards. Students are required to
know about foreshadowing and need to identify examples of it within a text and they must also be able to
identify character traits for major and minor characters in literature. If you will notice, however, one of these
questions is a "Thinking Question", because there is a definite answer to what is being foreshadowed, and the
other is more of an "Open Ended Question", because while there are definite wrong answers when describing
Christine, there are many many correct answers.
If you will notice, we don't have any true or false questions, no multiple choice - though you could do those as
well if you decide to create a test (that will be on a later blog).
So here's the challenge for you - look at chapter 1 of your book and create at least five questions about that
chapter. The catch is, only two of the questions can be from category 1 and you must use all three categories.
Until Next Time: Rubber baby buggy bumpers!
QUESTIONING YOUR BOOK
The other day I began writing about teacher guides and how they can help get your book into schools. What I
neglected to mention, mainly because it is rather exstensive, is how to create them. Today, I am going to talk
about questions.
One thing every teacher needs when reading a novel with their class is a plethora of questions to ask to either
generate discussion, make the students think or check that they read the selection in the first place. Creating
these questions can be easy, but too many people stick with the last category and that can be a problem (I'll
explain why shortly). As I stated the other day in Teacher Guides, your overall goal is to make your guide
compatible with state teaching standards. They can be found HERE. As you will notice, there are a lot of them.
You don't have to hit on every one, but you can get through many just with your questions.
To make this easier for those who aren't teachers, I am going to explain this as simply as possible. So, any
teachers that do read this, please don't roll your eyes at it.
There are essentially three levels of questioning:
1) Basic Comprehension Questions - These are to check for understanding, and also to check if the student
actually read the story.
2) Thinking Questions - These are to make the students look deeper into the story and pull out information
that isn't freely given to them.
3) Open Ended Questions - These questions don't necessarily have a right or wrong answer, but will get the
students thinking. The students should have to back up their response with information from the story.
By far the easiest questions to create are the Basic Comprehension Questions. The questions are pretty
much correct or incorrect when responded to, and the student will only have to really skim through the
passage in order to get them correct. A question like this might be "What does Christine tell Sam at the
beginning of Chapter 1?" There is only one response, because she only tells him one thing. If the student
didn't understand, or more likely didn't read, they will get the question wrong. While it is necessary to include
them, you really don't want to have too many of them, because while it does check for comprehension, it
doesn't do much for learning. Which is why you want to stick more with the questions in categories two and
three.
For the other categories is where the standards mentioned earlier really come into play. As I said, the answers
for these questions won't be placed right in front of the students and they will need to look deeper into the
work to answer them. They can vary in difficulty from very easy, to incredibly difficult, but they must take at
least a sentence to answer (No "Yes or No" questions from here on out). For the first chapter of High School
Heroes, two of the questions I asked was this: "Identify one example of foreshadowing in this chapter" and
"Describe Christine's character." These aren't very hard questions, but it does do two things. First, it makes
the students think about what they have read. Two, it hits on two of the standards. Students are required to
know about foreshadowing and need to identify examples of it within a text and they must also be able to
identify character traits for major and minor characters in literature. If you will notice, however, one of these
questions is a "Thinking Question", because there is a definite answer to what is being foreshadowed, and the
other is more of an "Open Ended Question", because while there are definite wrong answers when describing
Christine, there are many many correct answers.
If you will notice, we don't have any true or false questions, no multiple choice - though you could do those as
well if you decide to create a test (that will be on a later blog).
So here's the challenge for you - look at chapter 1 of your book and create at least five questions about that
chapter. The catch is, only two of the questions can be from category 1 and you must use all three categories.
Until Next Time: Rubber baby buggy bumpers!
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