Inviting students into the pursuit of meaning

This article describes the basis of Questioning the Author, an approach to encourage students to engage with text ideas. The article begins with a des cription of what motivated us to design the approach, which was based on a series of studies conducted in the 1980s that provided a revealing look at how young readers interact with the ideas in their textbooks. We observed t hat students tended to resist grappling with text ideas, but rather dealt w ith text at a surface level. We hypothesized that students could be encoura ged to consider text ideas if the reading situation was set tip as a dialog ue with a text author thus our notion of Questioning the Author. Examples o f how Questioning the Author functions in classrooms are provided. A summar y of findings from implementations of Questioning the Author are presented in terms of changes in the roles of both teachers and students in classroom discussion.