Leader Preparation for Discussions

Your role as discussion leader is to ask questions that encourage everyone in the room to participate. You don ' t answer questions; you just ask them. You may feel frustrated that you are limited in what you say, but you ' ll see a huge increase in the liveliness and dynamism of the discussion, if you focus entirely on drawing out the ideas of others.

Your main job in preparation is to develop questions that will get the conversation started, and then to keep people focused on the text.

There are three kinds of questions that lead to three kinds of answers:

Factual Questions ask "what happened" and lead to short, dead-end answers.

Interpretative Questions ask " what does it mean ?" and have more than one possible answer that can be supported by the text. Interpretive questions lead the discussion into an exchange of ideas .
Evaluative Questions ask "Is this true for you?" and go to readers ' personal experiences for answers. They are usually best if saved until the end of the discussion.

How do You Develop Interpretive Questions?

The best questions are those for which you don ' t know the answer - different readers will usually have different answers that can be supported by the text: "Why did Adam and Eve disobey God?" "Why did Antigone defy Creon?" "Why did Jack climb the beanstalk a third time ?"