Thanks so much for sharing your experience: I really liked. And the questions on the whiteboard that you picture in your post are… whoa! :)

I was skeptical, but I also have great faith in my students, so I set up an experiment. Typically, I will use a novel to explore a particular idea: for example, I might use Frankenstein to explore our relationship to the things we create. And the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program (IB MYP) we have insists teachers start a unit of instruction with a so-called guiding question to lead the discussion. However, this time I said to my students let’s just read Frankenstein slowly and carefully and then ask ourselves what questions do we want to think about and try to answer.

Each student was responsible for leading a discussion on a chapter of the t book. They posted their notes on a wiki and the rest of the class was responsible for making edits and modifications to those notes. My job was to back fill history, biography and philosophy, etc–things the students couldn’t know just from reading the novel. This meant that the students didn’t have to worry about taking notes and could focus on the discussion at hand. It also gave us a comprehensive set of notes on the novel to refer to whenever needed.

The project took 12 weeks and the students said they never enjoyed reading a book in class so much. It was, proabably, the first deep reading they’ve ever made (I wonder if we don’t move through too much material, too fast in middle school). Along the way we answered all the questions I’ve usually asked my students; we made comparisons between Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and modern science’s monsters–nuclear power and genetics–and looked at our relationship to and responsibilities for the things we create.

But when we finally asked ourselves “What does the novel ask us to ask?” I was amazed at the students’ responses. We threw our thoughts onto the whiteboard then grouped them into a couple categories. Their final question, the one they wanted to explore: Where do humanity and monstrosity cross? That is a worthy question and one I would not have thought of myself. You can see a short Animoto show of the process here: Gr 9s Question Mary Shelley.

The kids knew that that was a question to explore, not answer, and chose to read Eli Weisel’s Night as a window on real monsters.

This was one of the most significant learning experiences for me as a teacher. I’m pretty conservative in my ideas about education, as you can see in my blog, but this experience convinced me that social learning coupled with good guidance from a teacher can produce amazing learning.