High Expectations - on accident

I am just finishing up teaching The Color Purple in my class, and I have seen a very interesting phenomena in my classroom. Because of a time-crunch I had students reading the book WAY more on their own than I had planned for. At the same time I was trying out a reading log system for students to use to select quotes and respond to the book. What I found during this process was that students were thinking about the book WAY more critically than I had ever had students do independently before. I had students selecting quotes from Nettie and making the connection back to Celie's experiance without any prompting from me - this, frankly, amazed me. Now, as I look back, I realize that I assumed, at some level, that students needed me to scaffold for them to get to some of these deep ideas. And, this experiance has shown me, that some students do. However, the students who were struggling with this much independent reading and thinking were the ones who were, honestly, struggling more with the reading itself. As I think about the implications of this, I that if I had spent more time on general reading strategies, and then launched into this way of reading the novel, complete with more student-student discussions, I would have had some very fertile ground for students to develop interesting and insightful ideas. I think that accidentally making them do more on their own, I had higher expectations for them and they responded accordingly. This is the first time, in all the times that I have used the term "high expectations" that I am starting to feel like I can see it and see how it works. Maybe its lame that it took me this long to get to this realization, but it is definitely influencing how I think about my teaching.