Asking the Right Questions to Help Our Peers In Writing

In my lesson openers I always have a "connect" in which I connect students' thinking about yesterday's lesson to today's lesson. I then have a "teach" in which I model for students the lesson of the day and also have them try it out. When I think about my modeling I use three categories; skill, strategy, and process. I model by stating the skill to the students, then giving them a strategy in which to use the skill, followed by the process to try out the strategy.

Connect: “In this classroom we work a lot with partners in order to give each other feedback on our writing. Today we are going to practice raising our level of questioning in order to get our writing partners to do their best thinking about their writing with the first drafts of our essays."

Teach: I will say, “Today we are going to practice the skill of asking meaningful questions. You are going to practice the strategy of annotating the text, by asking questions as you read your partners writing.

The process we will use is as follows;

1) Read my partners’ writing

2) Ask myself: What questions do I have about how they composed their essay?

3) Jot down my best questions on post-it notes under the sentence where I thought it. 

I had the idea for this lesson from reading this: http://rightquestion.org/make-just-one-change/. Check it out!

Independent Practice: Students will read two drafts of writing individually while writing down their best questions. I will direct them to write down at least two questions they have per draft. I want to see what questions they organically devise, therefore no prompts or modeling will take place. 

I believe that the end of the lesson should be an assessment of the days’ learning; therefore it should be independent work. I always end class with an “exit ticket” in which students write down the response to a question.

I will have them reflect by asking them to write down and then share as a class, “What did you learn about asking questions today? Why is it important to ask good questions as a writing partner?”