Benjamin Karl
Benjamin Karl
English Language Arts
Embedded Files
Student Thinking
Student Thinking
Eliciting and Interpreting Student Thinking (EIST)
Eliciting and Interpreting Student Thinking (EIST)
My 10th Grade Honors students were just beginning their work with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The novel opens in media res with the main characters—all children—awakening to find themselves mysteriously marooned on a deserted island. As readers, we observe the children putting together clues as to how they might have gotten there while simultaneously embarking on journey’s of self-discovery under extremely hostile circumstances. The ambiguity of the novel’s opening presented a perfect opportunity to conference with students individually and practice eliciting their thinking and engagement in a low-stakes, conversational setting.
To establish a baseline across all conferences, and to reduce the likelihood that I might inadvertently guide them toward a particular conclusion, I created a single interview protocol consisting of open-ended and potential follow-up questions.
This was relatively early in the semester so I knew that I and the students had something in common—we were all fairly new to each other. I used this fact to rapidly establish common ground and rapport with each of them, asking if they knew everyone else’s names in the class and then commiserating over the discomfort that comes from being in a sea of strangers. All the while, I maintained a friendly tone, laughing and smiling to keep the students at ease while keeping my diction professional enough to act as a reminder that the conversation should remain school-appropriate.
I believe my efforts were successful as all the students interviewed were loquacious, and their ideas seemed coherent and well conceived rather than nervous and jumbled. Nadia in particular talked at length about her ideas regarding morality and human-ascribed meaning. Through her writings, I would later confirm my suspicion that she thinks deeply about many topics and often writes about them quite poetically. That she felt comfortable being herself so soon, gave me confidence that my strategy for establishing rapport was sound.
The novel is an allegory, something we had not yet explicitly discussed with the students but were hoping would be a sort of an “a ha!” moment later on. These are, however, Honors students, and I quickly realized that each of them was giving me Schmoop or Cliffs Notes responses to my early questions about “what do you think is happening?” or “why did the author write this?” I needed to maneuver the questioning toward something they might not have diligently researched before reading.
For Brandon, I wanted to see whether his answers were memorized or actually internalized, so I asked him about where he sees examples of these things in the real world and in his own life. Happily, he bypassed obvious allegorical references to the government and instead discussed power in the classroom. This gave me insight into his concerns about classroom order and perception, something that would resurface is Socratic seminars later.
With Salma, it was much more challenging to break her from stock answers and an obsession with identifying the correct allegorical references in every scene. I tried asking her what she thought about the characters themselves, but still her responses largely came back to analysis of the mechanism underlying the story. What I did ultimately elicit from Salma was that she was uncomfortable with allegory because she tends to take everything literally. In a near non sequitur, she then went on to say she talks out loud as a way of working through things. This was a decidedly unexpected line of thought, but I followed it as far she would let me before she apparently became uncomfortable with not having found the right answers to what was going on in the novel.
One of the major objectives of this practice is to gain insight into a student’s thinking by following them, without prejudice or leading questions, to whatever conclusions they naturally arrive at. This was largely successful, as I was able to here describe character traits and approaches for of each of these students that would be on display again and again throughout the semester. I also realized on reflection that it was going to be necessary for me to at least briefly research those sites—like Schmoop or Cliffs Notes—where ambitious students might look for answers, so that I can tease out their own unique insights as something separate from what they’ve hurriedly researched the night before.
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