I liked this piece--although I must admit to reading it rather partially, paying more attention to the beginning and less to the practical suggestions, which I will come back to now that I know this essay exists.
What intrigued me about this piece was Meyers' concentrated effort to offer different ways for teachers to elicit questions from students and to make student-generated questions not just the starting place for discussion (I often use them that way) but the foundation of of inquiry driven learning--the kind of learning I am committed to in my classrooms. He provides a well-reasoned rationale for putting student-generated questions at the center of classroom learning.
This semester, in my Women and Literature course, I put students into "Scholars' Communities" (not sure about the name, but there it is), who meet in frequent workshops. The first workshop asked them to generate discussion questions for chapters of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. I set aside an entire class session--over an hour--for this workshop, and truth be told, felt a bit guilty at not "teaching." I walked from group to group, to see what students were doing, offered suggestions, asked questions of my own, but in general, did not expend much energy. I was just sort of there.
Reading Meyers' essay, I feel much better about myself! I did "teach," just not in the way in which I was taught to "teach."
Over the next class sessions, individual scholars communities will present their responses to a chapter of Woolf's text and pose their discussion questions. Let's see how they'll do.
I am sure to go back to Meyers' essay for future workshops.
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