The Power of Questions: Gauging Reading versus Engaging Discussion

By Sharon Thomas, Director of K-12 and Family Engagement Programs

In a world often focused on “getting answers,” Touchstones® focuses more on asking questions, questions that support the group in building community and collaboration. Questions set the tone or, as the young say, vibes for a discussion. Depending on who the discussion leader(s) is, questions also set agendas. Will the focus of the discussion be set by one person, or will that power be shared by the group? At Touchstones, we focus a great deal in professional development on formulating opening and follow up questions because they are so important in shaping the entire interaction.

The Importance of Questions

Touchstones works to help students engage more fully with each other to become better thinkers, collaborators, and leaders. The skills that Touchstones teaches directly are speaking and listening skills: how to have civil discourse, how to listen, how to create safe environments where all voices are valued, and how to speak intentionally—to use one’s voice in ways that purposefully advance the group’s shared efforts. Because Touchstones involves a text as the “touchstone” for the discussion, educators often mistake Touchstones for a reading lesson.

A key element of Touchstones lessons is that they are not reading lessons. In a reading comprehension lesson, teachers focus their questioning to ensure that students understand everything about a passage that the teacher wants them to understand. Reading lessons are appropriately teacher-directed. When deciding on questions for a reading lesson, teachers ask themselves “What are the most important things that students need to know or understand about the content in the text?” and draft questions accordingly.

In Touchstones, our main focus is getting students to begin their collaboration, to engage them so deeply with each other that even normally reticent students may be eager to speak. A Touchstones teacher asks themselves “What topic related (directly or indirectly) to this text will students have experience with? And how will those lived experiences help them connect with each other?” That’s a very different focus than that for a reading lesson. Reading teachers want answers; Touchstones teachers want exploratory discussion.

That difference has implications for engagement in discussion as well. In discussion tied to reading lessons, students correctly perceive the need to meet teachers’ performance expectations with correct answers to the questions. That pressure leads most students to avoid responding to questions for fear of embarrassing themselves with incorrect answers. But in Touchstones discussions, that type of teacher-pleasing behavior is explicitly deemphasized, and engagement grows from students genuinely wanting to share and hear other’s ideas on a topic. Changing that habit from teacher-pleasing behaviors in discussion to a more collegial discussion environment benefits the discussion and the classroom climate.

Reading Lessons vs. Discussion Lessons

What does the difference between reading comprehension questions and engaging discussion questions look like? Below is a Touchpebbles (Volume A) text most often used in 3rd grade (Touchstones Discussion Project, Inc. 2012). The adapted text is from Fanny Jackson Coppin, a pioneering educator who worked in Baltimore, Maryland, more than 100 years ago.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Advice to a Teacher

by Fanny Jackson Coppin

 

  • Never let the word dumb be used in your class.
  • Many children called “dull” or “dumb” would learn quickly under a patient, wise, and skillful teacher.
  • Teachers should try to improve themselves just as much as they try to improve the student.
  • Remember that when you are teaching, you are dealing with a human being, whose needs are like your own.
  • To get the benefit of education, the students must educate themselves. The teacher can only direct that effort.

In a traditional reading lesson involving this passage, when a teacher considers, “What do students most need to understand most about this text?” they may focus their questions on the time period in which the text was written, the application of these rules to classrooms today, what Coppin’s purpose was in writing the text, what the main idea is, etc. Those are all worthy questions for a reading lesson.

But Touchstones is not a reading program; it’s a speaking and listening program. Touchstones wants the students to talk to each other, not to give “right” answers about the text to their teacher. The most engaging elements of this passage connect to students’ lived experience in school. Even at this young age, their lived experience is as valuable a tool for learning and for discussion as anything in the text. In the Touchpebbles Volume A Teacher’s Guide, we structure the lesson to focus on ideas from the text that will engage students in wanting to talk to each other.

The lesson’s questions below in the Individual Work and Small Group Work activities support students in focusing on their own ideas first and then examining those thoughts with a small group to prepare them for the Whole Group Discussion:

 Worksheet 11: Advice to a Teacher

 

         INDIVIDUAL WORK

  1. If you do something wrong or foolish and someone calls you “dumb,” how do you usually feel?               Check the item that best describes your response.

❑ a) Embarrassed

❑ b) Angry with yourself

❑ c) Angry with the person who called you “dumb”

❑ d) Unwilling to accept advice or help from that person

❑ e) Other: ___________________________

  1. What advice would you give to a new teacher who wants very much to become a good teacher?
  1. You have just read some advice to teachers. If you were a teacher, what three pieces of advice                would you give students to improve their learning?

From Touchpebbles, Volume A. ©2025 Touchstones Discussion Project. All rights reserved.

Once small group work has ended and students move into Whole Group Discussion, the Teacher’s Guide encourages teachers to focus on questions that support students in discussing their own ideas and allowing them to be the ones who decide what they talk about. In providing a list of questions that a teacher can use strategically to foster more participation and support student-centered inquiry, we offer these options:

POSSIBLE QUESTIONS TO RAISE

  • How would your advice help a teacher?
  • How would your advice help a student?
  • What would you do if you were a teacher and a student did something wrong or foolish?
  • What would you do if you were a teacher and two students started fighting in the hallway?
  • What do you think the author means when she says, “students must educate themselves”?

From Touchpebbles, Volume A. ©2025 Touchstones Discussion Project. All rights reserved.

Coppin’s piece supports respectful, civil discourse, and it touches on elements of the Touchstones Ground Rules. Students are introduced to this text during week 11 of the school year, during the Cooperation stage of group formation. They can examine how they’re treating each other and why, they can reflect on what it means to be a teacher and a student, and they may even bring up some of those more traditional reading question topics along the way. The choice is theirs.

Don’t get us wrong: we love reading, and because Touchstones programs reinforce multiple levels of engagement with text, we have school data demonstrating that Touchstones supports whole-person literacy and reading comprehension. But during a Touchstones lesson, reading is not where the teacher is putting their energy. Their energy is on the group, on helping students to open up, to engage more meaningfully with each other, to provide psychological safety. Establishing that environment leads to the kind of deep practice that fosters not only to civil discourse but also real collaboration.

Questions are inherently a beautiful thing. Questions connote curiosity, learning, and exploration. Understanding which questions foster engagement is a hallmark of strong discussion leadership. Providing students with choice and flexibility in questions—and authentically valuing their lived experience and not just the text—encourages them to explore texts and discussion for themselves. They can return to regular reading lessons with teacher-directed questions the other four days of the school week. But once a week, on “Planet Touchstones,” they learn to navigate themselves and each other.