In evaluative discussion, the teacher either passively accepts students' personal values and experience, or tries to challenge and develop them, which leads to both pedagogical and ethical pitfalls. Students originate and develop opinions . We urge teachers to ask only genuinely open questions. A teacher's opinions, whether voiced openly or disguised as leading questions and selective challenges, relieve students of the need to think on their own. To acknowledge students' efforts, teachers instead address the content of students' responses, asking them to explain their thinking and to comment on others' opinions.
Students recognize such questions as encouraging and validating.
Because the teacher's questions prompt students to draw evidence for their interpretations from the text and to consider alternative opinions and evidence, students develop their own opinions and build an interpretation of the whole from their own insights. In the Junior Great Books Curriculum , we have applied these four conditions of the shared inquiry method to a three-phase process of reading twice and then revisiting the text. Read once, then ask questions . After students read a text, the teacher invites them to ask whatever questions they have and to suggest possible answers. In every class observed in our pilot of the Junior Great Books Curriculum , students asked at least one interpretive question.