Working with students to choose an inquiry - a bumpy experiment

Last Fall I inherited a new Reading course and started by working with curriculum shared by previous teachers. The themes for the course came out of a traditional Reading text with short non-fiction articles around a series of themes. The text supported practice of a sequential set of discrete reading skills, starting with the skill of previewing text.

After my students practiced previewing the title, headings, first sentences of paragraphs and article conclusions I tested their new skill by asking them to complete the text's comprehension questions after their preview but before close reading the article.  Students were able to answer the questions correctly without reading the article. It looked to me like the text was too easy for them, but I wanted to know if they thought so, so I asked. They were unanimous: yes!

Since one of the skills needed in strategic reading is the ability to ask and pursue significant questions, I decided to use the search for a new reading theme as an opportunity to practice developing questions and finding answers through reading. My goal was to involve students in a transparent process to create a class-level "inquiry" into a significant question.

I set up the process by telling students we would work together to find other texts to develop their reading and asked if they would like to identify a new theme or choose a theme from further on in the text. They reviewed the textbook Table of Contents and chose the "new theme" option.

I then asked them to think of ten questions that they would like to know the answer to and to bring them to class the next day.  The next day they wrote their questions in big letters on the whiteboard. We looked at them together, adjusted and fleshed out some of them, eliminated some, and added some. When we seemed to have enough that looked workable (10? 15?) they voted by putting dots by questions they'd like to pursue. Each student put five dots by their first choice, four by the second choice, etc., down to one dot for fifth choice. We then reviewed the questions that had the highest dots from each person, and discussed the options to choose a class inquiry.

The inquiry they chose was: Why are books banned?

However, after the activity ended and as students were packing up and getting ready to leave, I overheard them talking amongst themselves about near death experiences. This was a theme that wasn't among the list on the board, and yet they were talking about it with more emotion and engagement than the ones we had looked at in the formal process. We briefly considered whether to do this theme instead of book banning, but they decided to do book banning first and then near death experiences.