Primer: Selecting Questions and Claims to Promote Interpretive Discussion

Interpretive reasoning is the backbone of this IA sequence. But, It’s not always easy to tell whether a question will spark the kind of interpretive discussion that supports students in developing literary reasoning skills. Take for example this passage from “Indian Education” by Sherman Alexie:

Fourth Grade

"You should be a doctor when you grow up," Mr. Schluter told me, even though his wife, the third grade teacher, thought I was crazy beyond my years. My eyes always looked like I had just hit-and-run someone.

"Guilty," she said. "You always look guilty."

"Why should I be a doctor?" I asked Mr. Schluter.

"So you can come back and help the tribe. So you can heal people."

That was the year my father drank a gallon of vodka a day and the same year that my mother started two hundred different quilts but never finished any. They sat in separate, dark places in our HUD house and wept savagely.

I ran home after school, heard their Indian tears, and looked in the mirror. Doctor Victor, I called myself, invented an education, talked to my reflection. Doctor Victor to the emergency room.

After reading this passage, one group of eighth graders developed the following questions:

• Why did Junior’s father drink too much? • How much is a gallon? • Why did Junior’s mother start two hundred different quilts but never finish them? • Will Junior become a doctor? • Why does his teacher think he looks guilty? • Why is there so much crying in this story? • Why does he call them Indian tears? • Why are some words italicized? • Why is this story called “Indian Education” when it’s mostly not about school? • Why does the Tenth Grade section include Junior getting his driver’s license and Wally Jim dying in a car accident? • What is a HUD house?

The Considering Interpretations activity was developed at University of Washington and University of Michigan by Sarah Kavanagh and Emily Rainey with invaluable support from Sarah Munger and other classroom teacher collaborators. © 2016 Sarah Kavanagh and Emily Rainey. For noncommercial use only.

Some of these questions could prompt lively discussion. Some of these questions could prompt discussion this is both lively and engages students in the kind of literary reasoning that we’re trying to help them develop. In the remainder of this primer, we offer a set of principles to support your decision-making about which questions/claims to pose to students inside of the Considering Interpretations and the Warranting Claims IAs. Principle 1: Student engagement is not your only consideration If you look at a question and you find yourself thinking, “My students would like to talk about this,” that is not enough to prioritize the question for the Considering Interpretations IA. Similarly, likely student engagement is not enough to decide on a particular claim for the Warranting Claims IA because the claim serves as a sort of question that launches the discussion. Let’s imagine that you posed the question “Why did Junior’s father drink too much?” (or, in the case of the Warranting Claims IA, the claim “Junior’s father drinks too much”) to your students, and it prompted a discussion about the relationship between racism and depression. Your students might be very engaged in this discussion. However, the reasoning they would be engaged in would be the kind of reasoning you’d like to see in a sociology class or a psychology class. In a literature class, we’re trying to push students to use textual evidence in the development of multiple interpretations of puzzling moments or trends in a piece of literature. This question, therefore, would probably not be a first priority for this particular type of discussion because it does not invite multiple text-based interpretations. It is not well suited to prompt the kind of literary reasoning that you, as the teacher, are aiming for (reasoning that, while different, is no less engaging than that of sociology or psychology!). Principle 2: The question/claim should invite text-based interpretations

Interpretive questions are questions of significance. They may begin with phrases like, “What is the meaning of…?” or “Why does…?” Interpretive questions invite multiple answers that can be supported with the text. Examples of interpretive questions are:

• “Why is this story titled ‘Indian Education’ when it is not really about school?” • “Why does the Tenth Grade section include both 1) Junior getting his driver’s license and 2) Wally Jim dying in a car accident?”

Such questions set students up to make and warrant interpretive claims using various parts of the text as evidence.

Speculative questions are either unproductive or simply unknowable using the text. Speculative questions are often ones that readers ask when reading a text for the

first time. They tend to mark the reader’s anticipation of what is to come. An example of a speculative question is:

• “Will Junior become a doctor?”

Such a question is perfectly reasonable to ask when reading “Indian Education” for the first time. A careful reader might wonder at the end of the Fourth Grade section when Junior calls himself “Doctor Victor” if he might indeed become a doctor. However, by the end of the story it is clear that the answer to this question is not going to be found in this text and that there are more productive interpretive questions to consider.

Comprehension questions are those that a careful reader could answer with the text. Often, comprehension questions are about word- or line-level meaning, but they could also involve plot, flashbacks or other organizational features, dialogue, etc. In short, they are questions that interfere with the reader’s ability to summarize. An example of a comprehension question is:

• “What is a HUD house?”

Although each type of question can be valuable to consider while reading, interpretive questions are the core of the IA sequence. Principle 3: The question/claim should invite multiple ways of thinking The best questions to promote interpretive discussion are ones that can be considered in multiple ways using the text. This does not mean that every potential response is equally valid; rather, it means that there are a number of ways that a careful reader could think about the question and respond to it. The two interpretive questions listed above each serve as good examples of questions that not only allow for multiple ways of thinking but actually invite it. When you are determining which question/claim to pose to students, consider how easily you are able to play out multiple responses using the text. If you are unable to fairly easily identify a range of interpretive responses, then you should either select a different question/claim or revise the question/claim. If you are unsure, then you might consider consulting a colleague who is familiar with the text to help you determine how wide the range of responses might be to your question/claim.