Chapter 8: Questioning While Reading

Chapter 8 was, overall, a really helpful and interesting chapter as far as working with answering and asking questions in the classroom. I think every teacher has the fear of not being able to answer one of his/her students' questions. Not only that, but also, as students, everyone always has questions, so how does a teacher provided a comfortable enough environment so that both the teacher and student has an understood relationship of unlimited questions and answer vocabulary?These are all thoughts that came to mind before I dug into this chapter.
This chapter emphasized the fact that questioning helps the learner clear any confusions he/she may have and help him/her understand things that are foreign; this points is crucial, especially in an inclusive classroom. If a student does not ask questions, how will the teacher ever know if they are confused or lost. This reminds me of a time that one of my students was confused about teh assignment and we were about 10 minutes into the assignment and i was busy working with another student on his writing prompt. I turn to look at the desk next to me and Cassandra is sitting there staring into space, without a word on her paper. I walked over to her and she explained to me that she did not know what to write. It is times like these where you wished you would have addressed the students who were confused first, I asked her why she did not raise her hand and ask me what she had to do and she said that she was in the bathroom and when she came back everyone was already working on their writing. Situations like this can be easily prevented when there is an open atmosphere for asking questions in a classroom. Cassandra could have easily asked one of her classmates what the assignment was or raised her hand to ask the teacher, but there was obviously something stopping her from doing so.
Which brings me to my next point that Harvey mentioned in chapter 8, in order to create this comfortable atmosphere of asking questions, students would be encouraged to record and ask questions before, during and after reading. This, I'm sure, does not only apply to reading, but to all subjects, assignments and lessons. As the chapter portrays in its own manner, teachers should always encourage questions and deepening the thought of everything having meaning and purpose. Teacher should demonstrate questioning in the classroom in order for their students to have something to model. An strategy used to expands students thinking and questioning is question webs: where students put a question in the middle of the web, and they stem answers off of it from different sources in order to get all types of varied perspectives. These question webs causes students to think deeper. This strategy is extremely effective, along with other strategies mentioned in chapter 8, like reading to answer a question or reading with a question oin mind. In my fourth grade classroom we always emphasize to the students if you are reading a reading prompt, chapter or story that already comes with questions to answer after, always read the questions first. Why? because then you know what to focus on in the sorry and it already outlines the important points of the text. All of these strategies can easily be implemented in the classroom, and can make a huge difference in literacy component aspects.