Overall this study provided evidence that implementing targeted questioning improved students' reading comprehension as well as my ability to effectively teach whole group and small group reading. The implementation of targeted questioning allowed me to plan successful small reading groups and build on each group's individual needs. I felt as though my instruction was more meaningful and effective when I planned questions that targeted specific learning goals. This intentional planning and implementation led to students with higher reading comprehension. However, this study did not come without challenges. Planning questions, especially at the beginning of the study, was difficult and time consuming. Fortunately, as I became more familiar with the process it did become less time consuming and I felt myself becoming more comfortable with the process. Another challenge was that students felt very uncomfortable with the higher level questions at the beginning of the study. They were unsure what to do when they did not know an answer or if the answer they provided was incorrect. As the study continued they became more comfortable with the productive struggle and also developed skills to figure out a higher level comprehension question knowing they would need to provide evidence for their answer.
I learned how much more effective my small group instruction can be when I preplan the questions I intend to ask. Before I implemented this research, I was not preplanning the questions I asked during my small group instruction. I always considered myself a good questioner during reading, but I truly found so much more value in preplanning some questions knowing that I would interject other questions during instruction as well. This balance between preplanning questions to target the learning objectives and interjecting questions during the discussion lead to powerful conversations and deeper comprehension of the texts.
This research has impacted my teaching by demonstrating the importance of preplanning targeted questions. For this research, I preplanned questions to help students build their reading comprehension skills. From this point forward I will preplan targeted questions for the other aspects of my instruction as well. What I found was it was so much easier to preplan higher level questions that better prompted students towards the learning goal when I wrote them before the lesson rather than improvise during the lesson. This allowed me to plan for expected responses and what I could follow up with if I was not provided with an expected response. I will continue to preplan targeted questions during my reading instruction, but I will also plan targeted questions for the other content areas I teach as well.
If I were to implement this research again I would put an additional focus on helping the students develop their own questioning skills as well. I think for this first round of research I was very focused on asking the questions I planned and recording the students’ responses that I did not always find the time to help the students improve their questioning skills. I think that when students are able to ask questions and evaluate the answers of their peers they are demonstrating a deep level of understanding whether that be in their reading comprehension or ability to solve double digit addition problems. As I continue to implement targeted questioning in my instruction I also hope enable students to develop the ability to ask questions of other students and evaluate if their response is accurate or not.
Next year I will implement the use of targeted questions in all of my instruction from the beginning of the year. I will commit the time it takes to plan the questions for each content area knowing that it will save me in reteaching time as well as making it easier to collect formative assessment data. I will keep records and notes of how my students' progress and use this data to plan for higher level questioning or to see what needs to be retaught.
The implementation of targeted questioning was best practice because the strategy was effective for improving my students' reading comprehension. I extensively researched the strategy, reading current literature as well as communicating with literacy experts and my building teammates. I used what I compiled from this research to implement a strategy I believed would fill in the gap my students were showing in their reading comprehension. Implementing targeted questioning also introduced my students to looking at texts more critically, as well as requiring them to be able to read a text and provide evidence to support a claim, both necessary 21st Century Skills. Students, now more than ever, need to be able to read, comprehend, and pull evidence to support claims from complex texts to ensure they are passing state assessments as well as being college or career ready.