Asking questions - the Tell Me approach

In 1993 the writer Aidan Chambers published a book called Tell Me: Students Reading and Talking (OUP), which had an enormous influence on teachers of students' literature. Based on a questioning framework developed by a group of teachers, authors and advisors, the book outlined an approach for eliciting students' responses to the books they were reading. The framework - different types of questions under the headings 'Basic', 'General' and 'Special' - is reproduced below, in a form adapted for film. The original approach was pioneered in primary schools, but it works equally well with older students.

The question forms were worked on and refined over a long period, with teachers and students, in an attempt to ensure that the questions were generative - that is, that they created spaces for students to talk extensively - and that they didn't threaten, or imply a right answer. In a video made for the Learning to be Literate series (1999) by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), emphasis is put on the need for teachers, and students, to learn and to practise how to ask, answer, and think about these questions, and there is no real adequate substitute for seeing it in operation. The effect is something like a conversation, rather than a lesson.

The Tell Me questions adapted for film

Basic questions

• Was there anything you liked?
• What caught your attention?
• Was there anything you disliked?
• Was there anything that puzzled you? That you'd never seen in a film before?
• Were there any patterns?

General questions

• Have you seen any films like this before? How were they similar? How were they different?
• How is this different from other films you've seen before?
• Having talked about the film, have you changed your mind about anything? Seen anything new? Been surprised by anything?
• Would you like to know more about how the film was made? What would you like to know?

Special questions

• How much time did the story in the film cover?
• Are there parts of the story that took a long time to happen but were shown quickly? And vice versa?
• Were there particular things in the film - shots, sounds, images - that you liked or didn't like?
• How could you have made the film better?
• Has anything in the film ever happened to you?
• What would you tell other people about this film?
• How many different stories can you find in the film?
• Where did the story happen? Did the setting matter, or could it have been set anywhere? Are there parts of the film that are especially about this place?
• Which character interested you the most? Is that character the most important person in the film? Is the film really about someone else?
• Did you ever get to know what the characters were thinking or feeling? Or was the story told from outside the characters, watching them, but never knowing what they were thinking or feeling?

In 2003, the bfi approached the CLPE to join in a collaborative research project investigating ways of working with film in Key Stage 2 classrooms. The CLPE introduced the Tell Me approach, but with an important development: instead of a questioning framework, they had been using grids. The rationale for using grids rather than a structured or semi-structured questioning framework is that is tends to be even less threatening or hierarchical, and more open-ended and generative. It can be hard sometimes to maintain a questioning strategy that is genuinely open-ended and which scaffolds students' learning and builds their confidence, rather than steering them towards right answers. That said, a mixture of grids and questions, as used throughout this resource, might offer the best of both models.

Tell Me grids

A grid like the one below can be a very useful way of helping students to focus on specific features in a listening exercise. Play just the soundtrack for a film such as The Little Things and ask students to think about what information it gives us about character, setting, and narrative (translated for the grid as People/Places/Time/Story):

• Can they hear anybody on the soundtrack?
• If not, does the music prompt them to imagine someone?
• If so, what kind of person? What are they doing? What do they look like?

People	Places
Story	Time

A class can be divided so that individual groups take on just one category in the grid, or, after the soundtrack has finished, the class can be divided into groups to recollect information about a single category. Extension work can be set up by asking students to identify which type of sounds give information about people, places and so on.

Sound itself can be put into grid form with any of Music/Dialogue/Atmospheric sound/Sound effects depending on the film.

Music	Dialogue
Sound effects	Atmospheric sound

Music can then be put into grid form: Instrument(s)/Orchestration/Pace or tempo or pulse/Mood (major or minor or mixed).

Instrument	Orchestration
Mood	Tempo

The advantages of grids is that they are truly open-ended but still help to organise students' watching, thinking, and listening.

Other kinds of grid will help students to frame a response to a film after they have viewed it: the Tell Me questions include ones asking whether students liked or disliked the text - though we imagine this can be quite risky, as a 'dislike' answer can close down discussion. Other ways of shaping responses can focus on identifying patterns in a text and similarities with other texts - not just films or books. They can articulate puzzles and surprises that the film has prompted. A common experience even on INSET with teachers is for people listening to live-action sound (like that for The Man With the Beautiful Eyes, for example) to be surprised that the source film is an animation. This should enable a conversation to open up about animation and sound, and why we assume that animation 'must always' feature 'cartoon sound'.

Finally, a popular staple of reading and of viewing is for students to predict how a story might develop.

In all of these examples you can see how the grid headings came from the Tell Me questions. The questions on setting, story and character, above, can similarly be turned into grids.

Lists of key questions are provided with each film.