Wilhelm+Chapter+5

**__Introduction & Using Schemas to Organize Teaching and Learning:__** Jeffrey Wilhelm introduces the chapter with a personal story from his teaching days. A student has made a deep connection to the book Tears of a Tiger__ by Sharon M. Draper, a book about a teenager's death. Wilhelm utilized a strategy called a "questioning circle" and this helped the student make the "text to self" connection. "Tom would carry that book inside of him, away from this class and into the world" (Wilhelm, p. 110).

Up to this chapter, Wilhelm has encouraged creating learning opportunities that come alive by "developing units around essential questions, planning backwards from meaningful student compositions and knowledge artifacts, and devising daily lessons that help students engage in meaning-making discussions" (p. 112). Here in chapter 5, he will introduce questioning schemes that help connect the activities, lessons, and texts within the unit to help create meaning for the students. These schemes include reQuest, question-answer relationships (QAR), and questioning circles. These questioning strategies will bring life experiences into discussion, help students take note of patterns and make inferences based on those patterns, look at many different perspectives, make inquiries based on single or multiple texts, moves thinking from the established, to new understanding, to the possible, and finally to complete the arc of inquiry. Wilhelm's Arc of Inquiry takes students from "factual comprehension to applicative literacy" (p. 113).

Wilhelm states that "detecting patterns -noting what belongs, what doesn't, what's significant, what's not- is the essence of inquiry" (p. 113). Students need to be aware that different patterns can be found in relationships, ideas, and themes. Researchers utilize this idea and take their findings, make connections and then create interventions that can change behaviors and situations. His final point- "in all inquiry, the pursuit doesn't end in understanding but in informed action" (p. 114).

**__ReQuest & Three Level Reading Guide:__** ReQuest is a new way for us to think about questioning our students. "ReQuest was the first questioning scheme to help students develop an active, inquiring attitude" (pg. 114). This scheme "requests" that we think about the kinds of questions we are asking about a text and that we might "re-question" those right-there questions with more higher level thinking questions. This will guide our students into a more inquiry-based learning and thinking. There are three main questions that this scheme wants students to do while reading: reading on the lines, between the lines, and beyond the lines. Reading on the lines means they "recognize key factual information that is directly stated" (pg. 114). This one is probably the easiest for our students. Reading between the lines is "making interpretive/inferential moves that require students to fill in textual gaps by making connections between various textual details or by connecting their experience to the text" (pg. 114). Lastly, reading beyond the lines is when students "extend thinking beyond the text's explicit and implicit meanings to evaluation and application in a larger world" (pg. 114). This scheme will help students change their thinking and take them from a literal way of responding and relating to a text to a more critical and applicative type of thinking. One way we can encourage students to use ReQuest is by using a Three-Level Reading Guide.

Wilhelm shows an example of the Three-Level Reading Guide on page 115 that can help students navigate through a text using reading on the lines, between the lines, and beyond the lines. Students use this guide while reading a text and can also use it as a way to begin discussions in a group. The primary goal is to familiarize the students with these types of questions and to encourage them to ask questions that incorporate all three levels of the ReQuest questioning. Some questions that can help students consider the level of question they are asking are "What has to be done to answer it? What kinds of reading strategies are needed? What kind of thinking gets activated?" (pg 118). This guide helps students ask questions that are not only directly stated in the question, but require inferencing or making connections.

There are many ways that the Three-Level Reading Guide could be used in the classroom. First, it can be used as a tool before reading. Filling out a guide before reading the text will allow the teacher to see the students' background knowledge on a given topic. It will show the students the key items that will be found in the text. It can also be used as an after-reading tool, so students can either compare their answers from using it before reading or it can "provide a great introduction to the three ReQuest questions" (pg. 118). The eventual goal of having students use this type of reading guide is for them to be able to create their own. The teacher must model using and creating the reading guide several times before the students will be successful. One way to prepare them is to gather a group of "experts," which are a few students who will work on a guide and compose questions. It is suggested that the teacher encourage students to use the three levels of questioning in ReQuest when composing and organizing their questions. Afterwards, other students in the class can give feedback on their types of questions, how they classified the questions, and if they covered all aspects of the ReQuest questions. An example of a teacher prepared three-level reading guide can be viewed here.

ReQuest and the Three-Level Reading Guide are great ideas to use in the classroom to enhance students' understanding of a text through a variety of higher-level thinking and questioning. "Once they have mastered these skills, students will be able to use these strategies independently while reading" (pg. 119).



__**QAR:**__ A popular questioning scheme is Taffy Raphael’s question-answer relationships (QAR) which are designed to help teach students how to find answers to questions. She breaks down the QAR into four sections to search for information in the texts and build on student’s background knowledge. //In the Text Questions// consists of right there questions and think and search questions. In **right there questions** students will find the facts right there in the text which is similar to reQuest’s “on the lines” questions. In **think and search questions**, which is similar to reQuest’s “between the lines” questions, students will need to look for important information throughout the text and think about the connections related to the details. The think and search questions are broken down even further with “simple implied relationship” questions where details are easy to find and questions are easier to answer and “complex implied relationship” questions where details are more difficult to find and harder to answer. //In My Head Questions// consists of author and me questions and on my own questions which are similar to reQuest’s “beyond the lines” questions. Students must think about what they know and predict what the author is trying to say in **author and me questions**. **On my own questions** require the students to make connections based on what they already know not necessarily what they read in the text. Examples can be viewed here.

Wilhelm suggests the 3 M’s (modeling, mentoring, and monitoring) when using QAR with novels. The teacher models the process through the first few chapters by asking questions and having students answer them. This allows the teacher and students the opportunity to discuss the different types of questions and when are the best times to use them. The teacher then mentors the students as they progress through the next chapters. The teacher can work with the students during this time to make sure they are on the right track. After the students have an understanding of the process, the teacher monitors them as they independently produce their own questions to further their discussions. If students need a visual representation of the questions, this resource is available to print.

Games provide students with an engaging opportunity to review what they have learned. Students can review a passage by playing a QAR review game. The groups come up with QARs. One group will ask a question while another group must determine what kind of question it was as well as answer it. The group must be able to defend their answer based on the type of question that was asked. If they don’t answer it correctly another group has the chance to give it a try. The game continues with the groups asking and answering questions to earn points.

With modeling and practice, students can use QAR to understand the facts, interpret the details, question the author and themselves, and come up with questions on their own to better understand the text they have read. Wilhem states the QAR scheme “emphasizes that readers must use various sources of information from their personal experience and the world as they read. It highlights that different questions require different kinds of work to answer, and that various cognitive activities go on while reading” (p. 122). If you would like to know more about QAR, please visit this informational power point presentation for the teacher. In addition, the website "The Reading Lady" has provided additional information on the QAR strategy at Thereadinglady.com pdf.

**__The Questioning Circle & Conclusion:__** Questioning circles is a teaching strategy that provides a structured framework for developing questions about a text. The questioning circle consists of three overlapping areas of knowledge that a reader has. Knowledge of the text being read (**Text)** Personal response to the text **(Reader)** Knowledge of the world and other texts **(World)** In Chapter 5, Wilhelm explains that questioning circles are different from reQuest and QAR in that it emphasizes that we //must// draw on and connect textual information to our personal experiences and to disciplinary or world knowledge in order to truly inquire about and understand a text. There are three types of questions that students can ask themselves to help gain better understanding of a text. A "**pure**" question is one that relies on one resource (either self, text, or world knowledge). A "**shaded**" question combines knowledge from these resources. A "**dense**" question organizes textual inquiry by combining all three resources (p. 124). Wilhelm provides an example of these types of questions on pages 124-128 for the book __Where the Wild Things Are__. He suggests that teachers try this type of questioning with a picture book. The text is usually fairly simple and comprehension is supported by the pictures.



In chapter 5, Wilhelm introduces 3 types of questioning schemes. The first scheme is ReQuest. It "requests" that students think about the kinds of questions they ask about the text. There are three main questions that this scheme wants students to do while reading: reading on the lines, between the lines, and beyond the lines. The second scheme is QAR. QAR is designed to help teach students how to find answers to questions. There are four sections to help students find more information within the text: right there, think & search, author & me, and on my own. Questioning circles is the last of the schemes. It is a teaching strategy that provides a structured framework for developing questions about the text. There are three overlapping circles of knowledge that the reader has; text, reader, and world. These types of schemes help us operate on texts (or on any other data set) as inquirers and knowledge designers, and to extend the meaning we find into our lives and our futures (p.129). We as educators need to help our students become inquirers so that they can become powerful learners. The schemes presented in this chapter help students achieve what fewer than six percent of graduating seniors can do: identify and explain complex implied relationships, argue for positions and justify conclusions with textual evidence (p.129).