Plan Around a Guiding Question
Kids engage in examining text evidence to address a guiding question
About this practice...
This is a unit-level strategy to organize instruction that will guide students’ thinking throughout the unit. Teachers plan instruction and select reading materials to address content standards. Social studies texts are often conceptually dense and students often struggle to identify key ideas necessary for identifying and building arguments, an important disciplinary literacy skill. Establishing a guiding question to drive the unit does more than organize content; it sets up a clear purpose for reading, builds a coherent thematic throughline, and gives students an authentic reason to continually refine their understanding through reading and other disciplinary tasks. High-quality guiding questions present a debatable topic, with multiple perspectives on how to answer it. A guiding question draws students to use disciplinary skills, like sourcing evidence and constructing arguments and counterarguments.
Why are Guiding Questions Effective?
Research supports the use of guiding questions to improve students’ engagement and overall comprehension of academic text.
- Research supports the use of peer discourse in developing academic language and understanding the elements of argumentation to support, both skills central to disciplinary literacy in social studies. Organizing peer discussion around a guiding question improves students’ comprehension of text and acquisition of content knowledge (Duhaylongsod, et al, 2015; Vaughn, et al., 2017).
- Social studies text activities guided by a central question set up a problem or dilemma. Students read with purpose to find text evidence in search of solutions. (Vaughn, et al., 2015; Vaughn & Wanzek, 2024).
- By creating a guiding question tied to the unit goal, the unit becomes a quest to answer the question or resolve a dilemma. In this way, students practice disciplinary literacy skills as they select and evaluate evidence, build arguments, and examine multiple perspectives. (Lesaux, et al., 2010).
Citations
Duhaylongsod, L., Snow, C., Donovan, S., & Selman, R. (2015). Toward disciplinary literacy: Dilemmas and challenges in designing history curriculum to support middle school students. Harvard Educational Review, 85(4), 587–608.
Lesaux, N. K., Kieffer, M. J., Faller, S. E., & Kelley, J. G. (2010). The effectiveness and ease of implementation of an academic vocabulary intervention for linguistically diverse students in urban middle schools. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(2), 196–228
Vaughn, S., Martinez, L. R., Wanzek, J., Roberts, G., Swanson, E., & Fall, A. M. (2017). Improving content knowledge and comprehension forEnglish language learners: Findings from a randomized control trial. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(1), 22–34.
Vaughn, S., & Wanzek, J. (2024). Promoting Adolescents’ Comprehension of Text: Efficacy and Effectiveness. Remedial and Special Education, 45(1), 58-67.
Vaughn et al. (2015). Improving middle-school students’ knowledge and comprehension in social studies: A replication. Educational Psychology Review, 27(1), 31–50.
How it Works:
Examine the unit objectives, lessons and materials to identify an overarching, unit-level issue that will be the focus of the question.
Create a guiding question that will serve as the unifying thread that runs through the unit. The question should be open-ended, with no clear right or wrong answer. Throughout the unit, plan to return to the question and create opportunities for students to discuss the question.
In lessons throughout the unit, create peer discussion opportunities for students to purposefully examine text evidence related to answering the question.
Build peer discussion prompts throughout the unit that require students to build on previous discussions, examine multiple perspectives on the guiding question, and build arguments and counterarguments.
At the culmination of the unit, prepare a writing prompt for students to answer individually or within their peer group to guide them in providing multiple perspectives to build a cohesive argument to answer the question. A suggested practice is to organize a class-wide debate for students to take sides in orally answering the question as a pre-writing activity.