Educational Leadership - September 2015

hy do you think that? Can you show us
where you found the information that helps
you draw that conclusion? While Agustin is
looking, can everyone else go back into the text to
see where that information shows up?”
The questions middle school social studies
teacher Lynell Davidson posed to Agustin and the
rest of his class encapsulate an important shift in
the way teachers are using questioning. Lynell and
other educators understand
that to comprehend and
think critically about texts,
students need two essential
skills: an awareness of the
cues that signal a need for
critical thinking and the
capability to use the cog-
nitive and metacognitive
tools that make such
thinking possible (Costa &
Kallick, 2014). Used well,
text-dependent questioning
can build both of these skills.

The Common Core State Standards highlight critical thinking as one of the dispositions needed for college, career, and life in a global society. But Socrates knew about the importance of critical thinking more than two millennia ago—and better yet, he knew how to unearth critical thinking through questioning. In a Socratic approach, a skilled and knowledgeable teacher poses questions that enable learners to first examine a problem or issue in its parts and then synthesize those parts to reach new conclusions.

We can see evidence of children’s and adoles-
cents’ capacity for critical thinking in their daily
lives. They select a toy after weighing the merits
of several. They mount an argument for why
the family needs a dog. They find a novel way to
advance to a higher level in a video game. But
without guidance, they’re unlikely to use similar
critical analysis to comprehend complex texts.

A Path to Text-Dependent Critical Thinking
To read and analyze complex informational and
literary texts, students need a path to follow. Over
time, they will travel this path with increasing
independence. Here’s a
text-dependent questioning
protocol that provides
such a path (Fisher, Frey,
Anderson, & Thayre, 2014),
with examples of questions
an elementary teacher might
ask during a discussion of
an informational book about
climbing Mount Everest:
1. What does the text say?
We ask factual questions—
who, what, when, where,
how much, how many—to promote initial, literal
analysis of the text and to build a foundation for
the critical thinking to come. Don’t rush past this
stage; some students will need a bit more time
figuring out the key details and main ideas. (How
high is Mount Everest? Who are the Sherpas?
What are the effects of low oxygen on humans?)
2. How does the text work? Next, we go a bit
deeper to determine the text’s structure. This
includes the vocabulary and the expository or
literary devices the author used to craft his or
her message. (How does the writer help you
understand what the terms acclimate and summit
mean? How does the heading “Home Away from
Home” link to the information about base camps,
even though the writer never repeats the phrase?
Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey