Coffee and Conversation: I wonder how many online profiles have listed this simple pastime as one of their interests, as a means of describing themselves or peaking the interest of others. Generally, people love to talk about what they think and how they view the world. We are excited by ideas and discussing them. And often our conversations revolve around things we’ve read—whether books or magazines… or blogs. So why isn’t conversation used more in the classroom? And why, when teachers try to get kids talking, is it so hard to get the conversation rolling?

As a reader, student, and a rather introverted human being, my personal answer to why it’s so hard to get the conversation going in the classroom is, naturally, multifaceted:

• we’re scared of being wrong;
• we don’t trust our instincts;
• sometimes, we ARE, as Naomi discusses, just flat out (embarrassingly) wrong;
• we don’t have a clue where to start;
• we feel like we’re at a middle school dance and don’t want to be the first one on the floor;
• by the time we walk into the classroom, we’ve forgotten all the brilliant thoughts we had while we were reading (or as we head off to class our brilliance of the night before seems rather obvious in the light of day); and
• so much of school is sadly, as Ginny so eloquently put it, about fetching answers to very specific questions.

Both the Difficulty Paper and the Inquiry Project address many of these issues.

As Sherry Linkon points out, “Too often students’ inquiries are guided by neither their own interests nor any genuine questions.” A.k.a., the difference that students perceive between considering a book over coffee and reading one for school. At school, they often have to follow somebody else’s interests from somebody else’s starting point. Both the Difficulty Paper and the Inquiry Project, however, start with the students—where they are and where they want to go. Like a participant in a conversation, they have some control in steering where the inquiry goes. Not only is this more likely to help them develop awareness of their own thinking process, it is more likely to truly engage them in reading literature and searching for meaning (one that actually means something to them).

I appreciate that the inquiry project asks students to reflect on how they approach the text, to think about the process of reading critically. I think that the root of my discomfort and insecurity with “critical thinking” is that it wasn’t something that was overtly taught in the classroom. Teachers told us that they wanted us to think critically, and then threw us into the texts and asked us to make conclusions without helping us identify when we were succeeding in thinking critically.

Both Randy Bass and Sherry Linkon emphasize that success comes with slowing down and putting off making conclusions. And as the section “Open-ended Synthesis” states, “the nature of the other elements of critical reading should make it impossible for a good critical reader to claim any definitive meaning or conclusion.” When every class paper seems built around deciding on your thesis, and then developing your supporting arguments, this approach is positively novel. It becomes more like the type of conversation we might have over coffee, where people hash out their opinions, bounce them off each other; where they can be wrong and not feel like their grade is going to suffer; where the point is simply to explore, to think. And just as in (polite?) conversation, there is no definitive, right answer that everyone has to agree with, just lots of steps in an ongoing conversation.