Breaking Down the Question/Prompt
Essay or commentary prompts usually either point students to a specific textual feature or a specific effect/meaning/feeling created within the text. It is up to the students to discover the second half of that “equation.” Looking at example guiding questions and breaking down what they already provide and what students need to determine themselves can be a generative conversation. For certain assessment rubrics, staying focused on the question is also a crucial skill, so this activity lets the students identify what the question components are.
Process
- Project an essay prompt or question. Read it out loud a few times.
- Give students 2-3 minutes to write down all of the sub-questions implicit in the prompt.
- Have students share these questions and write them down under the main prompt.
- Then, have students order the questions in the order in which their answers must be determined. Typically, the questions you need to address first to answer the prompt are quite concrete, and they grow more interpretive as you move down the list.
- Go over these questions and the appropriate answering order as a class.
- Repeat the process with a few more questions until students get the hang of it. You could have students work on questions in small groups and then share out with the rest of the group.
- With remaining time, allow the students to choose one of the prompts you broke down and use a text (or two, if the prompt is comparative) to answer all of the sub-questions that you divided it into. This is effectively brainstorming in preparation to write a thesis!
- Depending on how much time you can give them to do that step, see if students can generate a rough thesis for the prompt based on what they discover when they answer the sub-questions.
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