Literature Questions Children Want to Discuss: What Teachers and Students Learned in a Second-Grade Classroom

Studying 18 students' questions during literature discussions became the focus of a qualitative exploratory research project that a university professor and a second-grade teacher pursued over the course of 1 school year. The research began as a study of the process of transferring responsibility from teacher to students in a literature discussion format designed to promote critical thinking but evolved into a study of what we and the second graders learned when student questions were the nucleus of literature discussions. The interpretative analyses of student-generated questions, discussion transcripts, student interviews, and research conversations are organized according to 2 themes: what we learned and what the students learned. It was evident that students were eager to pose questions that addressed what they needed and wanted to understand about literature and life. When given the opportunity to write, they generated numerous and varied questions. They listened carefully to each other and willingly discussed all questions presented. Students exhibited a desire to communicate about what perplexed and interested them by attending to the wording of questions. This led them to listen carefully to each other and offer suggestions for more exact statements of questions. We learned about our tendency to impose our own ideas about what constitutes a "good" discussion question on students' question asking. We concluded that the study was more about the process we had to undergo to accept that students provide the "right" kinds of discussion questions when they have opportunities to ask about anything they find interesting, curious, or confusing.