Framing Discussion Questions
Quote for Today and every day: "When we
assume, we make an ass of u and me."
-- John Waters
Here are some "do"s
and "don't"s to help you understand my expectations for your discussion
questions which should be written out on a 3x5 card, with your nae on it, ready
to turn in at the beginning of every class. My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me
know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing,
please contact me with constructive criticisms. Thanks.
Why We're Doing This
I can tell a lot about how carefully you've read a text from the kinds of
questions you ask of it, so obviously one of my purposes is to help ensure you
read the material carefully. Rather than taking up valuable class time
with pop quizzes or making you think this is the kind of course where it's ok
not to do any work except for cramming for the exams or pulling an all-nighter
the night before a paper is due, I want the discussion questions to help you get
in the habit of being an active, critical reader. In fact, your getting in
the habit of noticing interesting things about writings and other phenomena and
asking incisive questions about these interesting things is the intellectual
foundation of the course--these are the fundamental building blocks of
rhetorical and critical analysis, and they can best be developed by consistent,
steady practice.
Two more pragmatic reasons it's worth your while to put a significant amount
of time and thought into these questions: avoiding boredom and getting better
grades. If you ask questions that you're genuinely interested in and that you
want others to be interested in, as well, you're increasing the chances that
we'll have a vigorous class discussion in which we all learn something.
How To
You need to ask questions which demonstrate you are thinking critically about
the reading. The paradigms of critical reading essentially are:
- Analyze: Break down the text into its parts, select important
or provocative parts
- Discover Patterns in the parts
- Add outside information from other readings, your own experience,
etc.
- Synthesize the outside information with the pattern you've
developed in step two, arriving at a new meaning. This can also be
considered as applying the pattern to a new phenomenon, testing a
hypothesis about the pattern, etc.
See also the Power Point on the critical reading process.
"Do"s:
- Raise questions that you believe would spark a class discussion you'd want
to take part in. If you've been dissatisfied with past class discussions, do
something about it. Put your concerns on the agenda. That's what this class is
for.
- Ask questions that matter to you--that you really want us to try to
answer. Give people a context for understanding the importance of the question
to you. It's often a good idea to explain why you're asking the question
you're asking, or to begin with an observation about or interpretation of a
particular passage or pattern that sparked the question for you.
- Ask questions that are genuinely debate-able, for which there are a
number of possible answers. When you ask a question, you might suggest
possible answers you've considered, or discuss ways of coming up with an
answer to the question (i.e., what we'd need to figure out to be in a position
to answer the question).
- Think carefully about the kinds of questions you could ask--such as
questions that help us understand the text better, that ask us to analyze how
it works or what it assumes, that ask us to give our reactions to it, that ask
us to evaluate it, that ask us to compare it to another text, that ask us to
relate it to an issue we've been discussing in previous classes--and choose
the kinds of questions you think are most appropriate for/relevant to a
particular text. Experiment with different kinds of questions over the course
of the semester.
- Rank your questions in order of importance to you. When I'm trying to
figure out how to synthesize all the various questions that people are asking
in order to put together an agenda for class discussion, I'll be looking most
closely at the first question you ask--that should be the one that you
absolutely positively NEED to discuss in class.
- Ask questions that are at a medium level on the ladder of
abstraction. In other words, very general questions ("So what the hell
does this all mean anyway?") and very specific questions ("What kind
of magical healing incantations did the ancient Greeks use, that Gorgias
apparently also used as a model for his rhetoric?") are not very useful.
In general, you can succeed in doing this by asking something about the
pattern you see (step 2) or asking folks what would happen if we
synthesize that pattern with other material.
"Don't"s:
- Don't just ask questions for the sake of asking questions; don't just ask
the first questions that come to mind. Be selective and prioritize.
- Try to avoid questions that need be answered only with a "yes" or "no,"
without any further explanation or thought.
- Avoid "factual" questions--questions, that is, in which you want someone
else to clear up some confusion about what happened in the text. First try to
figure out these kinds of questions for yourself (several of them that I've
seen can be solved by a quick trip to your local
dictionary).
- Don't put what's really an observation or interpretation in the form of a
question--if you have a point you really want to make, much better to say it
straight out and ask a follow-up question that relates to it in some way.
- If you find it difficult to come up with questions, it's probably a sign
that you're not reading the text carefully enough or giving yourself enough
processing/brainstorming time. Adjust your work schedule accordingly. If you
don't, you'll find it very difficult to complete the other, more formal
writing assignments. Or to put the point more positively: the more work you
put right now into asking questions, the better off you'll be when it comes
time to write your projects.