Hot Seat

I've been focusing on questioning in reading and an activity that I found really useful and students love is called "Hot Seat".  I learnt about this activity when I was on a professional development workshop titled Teaching EAL Students in Mainstream Classes  presented by Margery Hertzberg.

During the reading session students read a passage that includes some details on a character, whether fictional or real. After reading the passage, the student is put in the hot seat. They sit on the teacher's chair and take on the role of that character. Students in the class are then able to ask the character questions and the student in the "hot seat" needs to answer with the information they've gained from the passage.

Some questions may be evaluative or inferential, thus, students in the hot seat have to make an inference about how the character may act or feel in a specific situation. 

This activity works well for assessing students comprehension of the passage and also the ability of students to form literal, inferential and evaluative questions. For reading, I follow John Munro's High Reliability Literacy Teaching Procedures. One of the strategies is questioning and this activity falls right into this category.

I would love for other teachers to try this out and send me their feedback and any modifications that worked well. :)