Five Ways to Use Question Stems in ELA

We can agree teachers really want to teach their students reading, writing, thinking, and speaking skills that can be applied to just about anything they do in and out of school. My Literature question stems are great because they teach students critical thinking and discussion skills by just simply asking one.

That being said, I know that even if students are reading, writing, and thinking critically we can all get a little bored of doing the same thing day in and day out.

That’s true for both teachers and students.

If you used the unit planner on page 15 of my Literature Question Stems Guidebook then you know I gave you some quick planning strategies to map out how many pages you would read each day, how to select a standard to pull question stems from each day as well, and then BOOM! You have a complete unit!

That’s still true!

BUT! I want to give you some quick and engaging teaching strategies so you can switch up how you use the literature questions each day.

Five Ways to Use The Question Stems

These lesson ideas and teaching strategies will keep students guessing a bit each day, will get them to participate in thinking critically on a consistent basis, and it will keep your class periods from feeling monotonous.

✅ 1️⃣ Activity One: Reading Responses

After students read a text, ask one of the question stems, and have students write a reading response that answers the question. Remind them to cite text evidence and you will always be hitting at least two standards at a time.

✅ 2️⃣ Activity Two: Book Clubs or Group Work

Assign each group a question stem from each of the nine different standards. Have them work together to answer the questions on sticky notes, to write a collaborative reading response, or to even create a presentation.

✅ 3️⃣ Activity Three: Socratic Seminars

These questions are the perfect tool to foster whole class discussions or Socratic Seminars. Simply ask a question and allow students to discuss. When there is a pause, students can ask their own questions or you can pick another within that standard.

✅ 4️⃣ Activity Four: Create a Mini-Unit

On page fifteen of this resource is a unit planner. I’ve talked about using it to plan out an entire novel study unit, but you could also take a short story and focus on one or two standards by asking 3-4 questions from the same literature strand(s) each day. This will allow you to really dig deep into concepts like theme or characterization in just a couple of days.

✅ 5️⃣ Activity Five: Have Students Do All the Work

After you have asked students these types of questions, give students one of the standards and have them create their own question stems. Split them into nine different groups, and each group is in charge of creating question stems for that standard. Or have all students come up with questions and students can choose which one they want to answer.

Try one of these Question Stems teaching strategies ASAP. You won’t be disappointed.

>> CLICK HERE << to download Literature Question Stems Guidebook.