60-Second Strategy: Question the Character

In order to get her students to dig deeper into texts, St. Marys Area Middle School English language arts teacher Dana Smith came up with a bell-ringer she calls Question the Character. The activity does double duty as a review of reading assignments—and a formative assessment for Smith to check students’ understanding of the material.

At the beginning of class, Smith hands each student a sticky note and gives them one to two minutes to write a question they’d like to ask a character. They can choose any character, as long as it pertains to the chapter or story they just read. “Students really struggle with coming up with questions, especially when put on the spot,” says Smith. But the sticky note helps with that: “If you give students a piece of paper, it can be very intimidating coming up with a question. But if you give them a sticky note, especially in a fun color, they can’t stop writing.”

These are examples of student questions, in response to chapter 8 of the dystopian novel The Giver, by Lois Lowry:

• “Jonas, does it make you nervous that the Receiver also has pale eyes?”
• “Asher, what type of activities will you plan at your new job?”
• “Fiona, how do you feel about working with the old?”

Smith runs the rest of the exercise in a couple of different ways. Some days, she asks if any students would like to share their questions. Other days, she opts for a lower-stakes option: She collects the sticky notes (students do not put their names on them, which keeps them anonymous) and picks some to share with the class. Regardless of which way she does it, Smith finds that having students ask the questions results in better classroom discussion about the reading. “It really keeps them more engaged in the story and not just zoned out answering comprehension questions and going over vocabulary.”

The Question the Character activity also helps students develop their critical thinking skills and better understand literary techniques like foreshadowing. Teaching them to “ask the hard questions and to go beyond what’s right in front of them is important. And for seventh graders, it’s an important skill to take into high school,” she says.

To find more resources that help students investigate fictional characters, check out Jodi Fernandez’s article for Edutopia, “Using Maslow’s Hierarchy to Teach Literary Analysis.”