What Does it Mean to "Teach" a Novel? (Part 3)

I have finished roughly half the books I have started in my lifetime. Don't judge me. If I had to read one for school, I read it. However, once my time truly became my own, I was more selective. I'm facing a bookshelf in my living room, and I can see at least ten dusty bookmarks sticking out of novels, essay collections, and should reads like books on parenting, marriage, and faith.

When my students have the opportunity to choose a text for independent reading, they very often come to me a chapter or two in and say, "This just isn't doing it for me." No problem. Go find a book that grabs you.

Whole-class reads are a different matter. A senior once told me, "This is the first time I actually read a whole book." Blink, blink. How had she made it that far without a cover-to-cover read? Was business, engagement, laziness, or accountability to blame?

If reading is medicine, no student--engaged or not--will want to swallow it. How do we engage teens and build skills without torturing them? This post is all about the controversial idea of not teaching the entire book. Consider the thoughts of these teacher-authors and comment!

Making Meaning with Melissa
This is sometimes controversial when I bring it up to my department, but I don't always teach the complete novel.  I have an essential question or theme that I focus on, and I like to focus on key passages to discuss/teach in class.  I encourage the students to read the whole novel independently, but I only teach those focus passages.  When I do this, I like to use my close reading units, like this one for To Kill a Mockingbird, focusing on the theme of courage.  This unit has six passages with close reading directions for each, a courage chart with directions, and an essay prompt, plus student and teacher models.  Students like "reading" the novel this way and often end up finishing the novels.

Grit.Grind.Teach.
With my upper middle schoolers,  I have the students read the whole novel in parts outside of class. I assign basic comprehension or skill practice questions with their reading at night, mostly as an accountability check. In class, we spend a lot of time going really deep into a few passages in the novel, and I generally focus all of our close reads around the same skill.

Teacher's Craft
I like to teach novels from start to finish because I like students to have the experience of finishing a novel.  In my classroom, I've seen students pick up a novel, read for the silent reading period, and then pick up a different novel the next day.  I want them to have the pride of finishing a novel.

I hit figurative language hard in my classroom because my ESL students have so much trouble with it; they either take it literally or it's completely lost on them.  It's one thing to teach what a metaphor is, but it takes it to a whole different level when students read it, analyze it, and understand it.  I use my Figurative Language Bell Ringers to introduce and reinforce figurative language before and during a novel. 

I love teaching novels because my biggest reward is hearing "I actually liked that book" when we're finished.  There's always one in the bunch.

What Does it Mean to "Teach" a Novel? (Part 2)

1991. It was the wild west, and I was a twenty-three-year-old gunslinger at Dudley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina. We had state ELA standards, but testing was low stakes, and my interest in aligning my lesson plans was even lower. When I "taught a novel," the novel was itself was the means and the end; I wanted students to love the chosen piece of literature and connect to allusions they would encounter in the future. That was about it.

Fifteen years later, I experienced a profound paradigm shift. No Child Left Behind created a need for curriculum coaches, and I began working at the district level to help teachers come to grips with state standards. I had joined the standards movement, and a novel simply became a means to an end. I advised teachers to think of a novel as a way to teach standards. (I'm sad just typing that sentence.)

I snapped to the middle pretty quickly when I went back to the classroom and remembered why I love teaching Things Fall Apart, why my students really get the angst of Okonkwo's son Nwoye and the fire of second wife Ekwefi. To me, to teach a novel is to ignite a love of language and build skills at the same time.

I asked some friends from TeachersPayTeachers.com to answer this same question, and I love their responses. In fact, I told all of them that I wish I had been their students. Here are a few ideas from them:

Room 213
When I "teach" a novel, I want the students to have the responsibility for analyzing the text.  I avoid chapter questions, because they just tell the kids what they should think. Instead, I expect students to take notes as they read (after they've been shown how) and then, after they have read a section of the book, they meet in groups to discuss their notes.  Each group needs to decide on the five most important events from the section as well as important quotes.  At the end of that class we have a full class discussion where students will defend their choices.  They will also chart character development - again, on their own and without chapter questions to guide them.  Almost always, the kids come up with the same things I would have asked them about, but this way, they've done the thinking themselves.  If they miss something, I will read a section to them and get them to figure out why I'm reading it, what I'm looking for.

We also read every novel with a guiding question in mind, something that will show them how the lessons in the text connect to their lives.  With To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, we try to answer these questions: "Where does intolerance come from?  What can we learn from TKAM about how to be more tolerant?"  In the end, they do a "Mockingbird" project where they have to reach out to a mockingbird in the community and find ways to teach others to be more tolerant of this mockingbird.

OCBeachTeacher
I want my students to take ownership for their reading and learning, so they will build their own understanding. 

Last school year I spent a lot of time developing whole-class reading discussion activities, and I have created strategies that were very successful.  My "novel study" gives students tools and guides them toward more meaningful discussion.  As they read, they use graphic organizers to take notes on their reading: summarizing, paying attention to author's craft and language, and providing text support. 

On discussion days, they follow procedures that take them step-by-step to whole-class discussion.  First, they start with a quick write and set a goal; then they progress to partner rehearsal.  When students have moved into their inner and outer circles, they start with a "whip around."  Students in the outside circle improve their listening skills by taking observation notes, and they can also move to the "hot seat" if they want to comment on discussion from the inner circle.  Finally, after discussion, students write a short reflection.  My Discussion Tools would be a helpful resource.

Spark Creativity
When I teach a novel, it is so different every time. In the same way different people will view an art exhibit, the path of the discussion for each group of students varies hugely. That's what keeps it interesting for me. I use the Harkness method of discussion, developed at Exeter. What it means for me is that I work hard from the start of the year to cultivate listening and risk-taking and responsibility for the discussion amongst my students. We sit in a circle and chew on the text, and I pay almost as much attention to trying to help guide the dynamics day by day (not interrupting, remembering to reference the text, not dominating, not freeloading, staying on topic, asking intriguing questions, etc.) as I do to helping guide the themes for discussion. This way, students learn how to access the deeper material from each other, and at the same time, learn how to have a respectful and balanced conversation, a skill I tell them will be equally important in every job, family reunion, dinner with friends, etc. as it is in my classroom.

I put up a video on YouTube a while back when I was presenting Harkness to some peers, and it gives a nice intro to the method for interested teachers. 

I have found that starting a discussion cold is not a good idea. Students just have too much going on in their lives to rush in from lunch or science class or a huge fight with their best friend and simply begin discussing the text. So we always do a short Discussion Warm-Up Activity to give the kids a chance to remember the reading before we begin discussing it. 

There are more teacher responses to come in Part 3 of this series!

What Does it Mean to "Teach" a Novel? (Part I)

It was a knock-down, drag-out fight, and it lasted for months. We wrestled. We argued.

The issue? To Kill a Mockingbird.

Teachers--one from each middle and high school in our large district--gathered for The Great Debate over who got to teach what pieces of literature. Does eighth grade or ninth grade get Mockingbird? Will Lord of the Flies be at ninth or twelfth? I was criticized for teaching Faulkner. Another teacher was slammed for Shakespeare overkill.

Why do we get so emotionally attached to the novels and plays we teach? Why, when I was a curriculum specialist, did teachers regularly call me because someone at a feeder middle school was teaching--you guessed it--To Kill a Mockingbird? (We had one diehard who refused to play nicely.)

I have my favorites: Things Fall Apart, Great Expectations, The Bluest Eye, Catcher in the Rye. Plays? I could teach Medea, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Julius Caesar all. day. long. Ask me to recite Marc Antony's funeral oration. Just ask. My favorite literature lesson to teach is the background for Oedipus. Their faces!

As this hemisphere gets back to school, my blog will be dedicated (for a week or two) to the teaching of the novel. What does that even mean? What should it look like? What should a novel study (or novel unit) include? Do we focus on skills or content? Reading or writing? What should assessment look like?

Follow along and join the debate.

5 Reasons Not to Give Zeros

Here's how the conversation goes:
Me: I don't have your essay, Trevor (Insert name of any disengaged male student)
Trevor: I didn't do it.
Me: The last day to turn it in was yesterday.
Trevor: I know.
Me: Why didn't you do it?
Trevor: I didn't want to.
Me: Are you going to do it?
Trevor: No.
Me: You know that means a zero.
Trevor: Yeah.
Me: That will kill your average.
Trevor: I know.
Me: I'm going to call your mom.
Trevor: Whatever.

If you've had that conversation with a student, here's your belief system:
1. All students care about grades.
2. The threat of a low grade will motivate a student.
3. An actual low grade will turn a student around and change his or her behavior.
4. If I do not give a zero for a missing assignment, a student will get away with something.
5. It is my job to teach responsibility by giving steep consequences for not turning in work.

Maybe you believe those five ideas because they were true for YOU. Consider these five reasons not to give zeros:

#1  By giving a zero for a missing assignment, a teacher is grading behavior, not skills or content knowledge. Is the zero a grade for rebellion? Non-compliance? If so, it should be a 100, right? The student has that skill set down.
#2  A zero skews a student's average and gives an inaccurate picture of student understanding. If five standards-based assignments are given by the teacher, and the student scores 100 on four of them and 80 on the fifth, the student's average is 96. If the student fails to do the fifth assignment and gets a zero, the average is 80. This student is demonstrating mastery on four of the five assignments, yet the average would indicate borderline proficiency.
#3  It is almost impossible to recover from a zero. If a student cannot redeem the score on one assignment, he or she will be playing catch up for the remainder of the grading period. The last thing you want in your classroom is a student who feels doomed.
#4  The teacher never gets to assess the skill. A zero means It's over. I've had MANY students over the years take a zero instead of speaking in front of the class. Instead of challenging that student, modifying the assignment, offering a different audience, or providing a different opportunity to face a major fear, I gave a zero.
#5  A zero hurts the relationship. We all know that getting a teenager to do anything is an intricate, complex dance that involves subtle moves, gentle challenges, a little sweat, and a lot of heavy lifting. A zero throws your partner off the dance floor.

So now what? It's simple: Require the work. My last four years in the classroom, I spent the first few weeks of school eating lunch in my room with students who did not have their homework. It wasn't fun; it was work time. They brought their lunch or went to the cafeteria first, and I provided a note for them to get back up to my classroom. Nobody wanted to be stuck eating lunch with me. They had to watch me eat tofu and asparagus while they say beside me at my desk and worked on the task. It didn't involve after-school time, so parents didn't squawk. Teachers who had lunch duty got a heads up to let students come upstairs. Kids HATED it. At my school, students were allowed to use their cell phones at lunch. Lunch was the time they did their homework for afternoon classes. It was social time. Oh, and the upperclassmen who got to leave campus for lunch! The pain of it all!

Instead of giving zeros, I took away what they loved most: time with friends. The first month of school was torture for them and for me. I needed the down time as much as they did. However, once students realized what I was doing, they started turning in more work. By second semester, students had passed the word to my next group of students: Just do it the first time she assigns it.

It wasn't a perfect plan. I had social misfits who chose not to turn in assignments just so they could avoid the cafeteria. There were some students who wouldn't do homework no matter what. There were many, however, who saw the light and got the message. The message was this: I need to know what you know.

Ten Tips for the New High School Teacher

They are coming. You are about to put into practice what you learned about instructional strategies, Bloom's taxonomy, and wait time for questions. Here are a few tips your college instructors might have skipped.

1, PUT OUT YOUR HAND. Introduce yourself to the treasurer, secretary, and custodians on the first day. These folks wield some awesome power, and you want them on your side.
2. CLOSE YOUR MOUTH. At meetings, sit, listen, and take notes. You are going to be tempted to make a name for yourself right off the bat. Resist it. Since you're 22 and a recent college graduate, you surely know all the latest pedagogical research and the best way to reach teenagers. Tuck away all that brilliance for later.
3. AVOID THE LOUNGE. Cynics and pessimists will see you as a blank canvas to be slimed. Eat lunch in your room. Students will find you, and some of the best relationship building will happen during that little chunk of time.
4. LEAVE WORK AT WORK. Others will tell you this task is impossible, but that's a lie. Get to work early, work efficiently while there, stay late if you can, and leave the papers on your desk. Your main planning time should be on the weekends. Adapt and tweak as needed during the week, but save your "planning period" for grading. In fact, go hide in a corner of the media center so you won't be asked to cover a class.
5. PLAN IN CHUNKS. Use the weekend to sketch out a three-week plan. When you walk in the door on Monday morning, have a detailed set of lesson plans for every class. You'll always know what comes next, thus reducing stress.
6. YOU MAKE THE SEATING CHART. You may think the cool teachers let students sit where they want. This is classroom management suicide. Have a penciled-in seating chart on the first day with students in alphabetical order (for passing out papers and learning names quickly). Watch the interactions and move students as needed. Fill the front row with students who are easily distracted, have vision trouble, or need more monitoring. Taking attendance is a breeze when you're only looking for empty desks.
7. SLEEP. You're no good to anyone if you do not have rest. When the bell rings in the morning, you will begin multiple interactions with 100 to 150 hormone-driven, ambitious, ladder-climbing, exhausted, troubled people; and then the students come in. You cannot pour out what you do not have in reserve. Rest.
8. MAKE THE CALLS. Over the course of the first week, call every parent who did not come to Open House. Introduce yourself, offer a reminder of some event, and ask if there are any questions. You could even get a jump on this by calling to remind each parent about Open House. Your relationship with parents is crucial; they have to trust you.
9. KEEP CONTROL. As much as possible, keep your discipline in your room. If you send students out or write them up for not having supplies, using profanity among friends, having gum, or being loud, you're sending the message that someone else has to handle what happens in your room. Lunch detention is a fabulous thing. They hate it, and it's a good deterrent. Get creative. Have a cursing jar and collect cash for supplies
, require collateral (like a shoe or car keys) for a pencil, etc.
10. TRY ON SHOES. Remember that the teenagers walking in your room are under stress, and they want to trust you and like you. Walk in Karla's shoes for a minute; her parents are undocumented, and she lives in fear that they will be deported. Walk in Jonathan's shoes for a minute; he has had three weak English teachers in a row and dreads your class. Walk in Katrina's shoes for a minute; she had a fight with her mother over breakfast this morning. Walk in Devon's shoes for a minute; he may be the first person in his family to graduate high school and longs for structure so that he can learn.