The Tell Me Framework (cont'd)

The Four Sayings

Chambers goes on to discuss the importance of talk. The act of sharing your thoughts with someone else provides a structure to your thinking and often this is clarifying to you as well as to your listeners. Chambers calls this "saying for yourself" and "saying with others." You may have said to someone, "just thinking out loud." What you are saying is that by talking through an idea, you can give it a form and coherence and thus it becomes clearer in your mind. If you go on to ask that person, "Does that make sense?" you are shaping your thoughts into another level of clarity, one in which your ideas are comprehensible to someone besides yourself. Sharing isn't just about your ideas, it's about the ideas that everyone in the group brings to the discussion. This, Chambers calls, "saying together." Combining the ideas of other readers with your own, you can discover new meanings and ideas you hadn't thought of before."Saying the new," Chambers calls this, and this kind of saying can bring about some of the deepest pleasure a reader can experience with a book.

Asking for Evidence

A great follow-up question in a discussion is to ask what the reader read that led that reader to a particular conclusion. "How do you know this?" or "What did you read that led you to think that?" Don't do this in a challenging way, but in a way that suggests you really want to know, (because you really do want to know!) and because you didn't catch that or consider that when you read that bit.  The Common Core does emphasize this point in its framework as well.

What Critics Do

Chambers borrows from W. H. Auden a list of six jobs a literary critic can perform:

1. Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
3. Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
4. Give a reading of a work which increases my understanding of it.
5. Throw light upon the process of artistic making.
6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, religion, ethics, etc.

Chambers' point in mentioning this list is that he contends that children are quite capable of performing each of these tasks of a critic.

A Few Basic Rules

Everything said should be considered as honorably reportable. This means that we will consider all statements to be an honest attempt to share what one really thinks. It means not using put-downs, but it also means if you don't understand what someone is saying you can ask, "How do you know that?" or "What did you read that suggested that idea to you?"

If you are leading a book discussion, here are two additional rules just for leaders:

Avoid inserting yourself into the conversation. As soon as you weigh in on what you think about the story, that has the tendency to become the "official" reading. It takes some time and experience with the same group of child readers to come to a place where the children see you as just another reader and feel comfortable challenging your understandings.

Only ask questions to which you don't KNOW the answer. You might have a good idea what the answer is, but you can't prove it and there are other acceptable answers. Once the mystery is gone from a story, it ceases to be a story that can produce rich discussion. Keeping the mystery of meaning alive can be a tricky task, but it can lead to much pleasure.  This connects us to the ideas of infinite and finite play – implicit and explicit meaning.

This is the basic framework of Tell Me. In Chapter 14 Chambers fleshes out the framework with additional questions. There is no proper order to ask the questions. All or even most of the questions should never be asked of one book. Usually, only a few questions are enough to engage a group in discussion. Too many questions and you risk exhausting the (playful) readers. Going back to the idea of framing, the questions Chambers lists in his book are not about squeezing out a specific reading or imposing a particular meaning. This is about uncovering possible meanings and considering them with others.

Finally, note the Tell Me games Chambers describes in Chapter 16. The Non-Reader Game is particularly useful and powerful. It's a way to engage children who may have been absent or just didn't complete the reading. The idea is to have the ones who have read the story retell it as a group for the benefit of those who have not read it. The non-readers may interrupt at any time to ask questions or ask for clarity. It's rare that after playing the Non-Reader Game the non-readers don't go back and read the story, often on their own time.