10/20/16 Eric Lesch

Today in class we started by going over our objectives for today's class. There were two objectives. One objective was to evaluate a discussion questions ability to probe evidence. The key word is probe in that objective because we would use that word to really discover and bring evidence into what we were discussing in class. The second and final objective for today's class was to craft a strong discussion question based on a unifying idea. Once the objectives were acknowledged, Mr Rivers provided us with three questions on the board. We were then told to discuss with our groups which questions we thought were bad questions and which we thought were good questions. The three questions we were given were:

1. Why did the film choose to start in space so far away from the first place we see any type of character?
2. Does this take place on Earth?
3. How did the planet get destroyed?

Many of the groups made up their minds at this point which the worst question and which was the best question. But we were now told to answer these questions within our groups and see if our opinions changed on these questions. After we were done discussing which were the good questions and which were the bad questions, we tried to establish specific characteristics of a good question and a bad question. These are the results.

Good Questions: 

• Are open ended - multiple perspectives
• Include details/evidence - IN THE QUESTIONS
• Use good verbs
• More specific - relevant details
• Close reading- mis-en-scene- literary analysis

Bad Questions:

• Very obvious - straightforward
• Obscure what you're really trying to discuss
• Create guesses

In this class we learned how to create well developed specific questions to rally make our podcast interesting to listen to.