At some point, if you are successful, students will want to read their own book. Here's how to do that...
Literature Circles are the next step in their development as readers, writers, and thinkers. Here's how to scaffold everyone's success, and how to share it with the rest of the class.
I’m setting aside all the local and state high school scope and sequence stuff you could waste your life reading for the moment, because I’ve found a better way to meet “the requirements” for most students—active joyful learning.
I taught in a rural high school at the beginning of my teaching career, moved to an urban upscale high school that wanted to chase national high school newspaper championships, then to a polytech high school where all the students were learning trades and I was eventually part of the Communications major classes.
The first thing you always do, if you are a journalist, is to understand the community. (You can see my Substack post at the end of this one that shows what I learned and loved about the Roseburg, Oregon, community.)
Elite high school communities have their own particular issues.
No one pays much attention (in Oregon at least) to tech schools. Don’t get me wrong, they should, as these are the hands-on students with the trade smarts to create the future. Just look at the state of Texas back in the 1970s when no one wanted to move their business to the state. They created large regional high schools that offered every trade and profession as electives in order to offer out-of-state businesses the skilled workers they needed. And it worked.
To put it bluntly, the people who every day of their lives keeps our communities running is endless: Future plumbers, electricians, home builders, HVAC technicians, heavy equipment operators, truck drivers, diesel mechanics, aircraft mechanics, machinists, solar panel installer, wind turbine technicians, dentists, gutter installers, auto mechanics, radio and television technicians and talent, educators, nurses, doctors, actors, carpenters, clerks, farmers, welders, CAD, computer programming, digital media … all of the unsung heroes who keep America running.
What does this have to do with English and reading and writing? Well, if you are only addressing the brain in your classes, your students are not learning the social, business, and discussion skills which are needed in the business world. They must also be ready to vote and participate in democracy—literally rule of the people—at the age of 18, and make heady decisions about who their leaders should be and why. They need the skills to have civic conversations with leaders, neighbors, friends, and community members to understand what our diverse communities are thinking in their heads and their hearts, and what we should, and should not, do about it.
So let’s start over again.
Once students have the basics under their belt (See my “Elements of…” readings that lay out everything they will need to know, simply, through college, as well as actual strategies for how to speak and present those ideas to others, and entertain questions.)
It starts in freshman English studying a variety of genres and voices, examining the People, Plot, Place, Point, and Perspective aspects of storytelling (fiction and non-fiction).
In a short story, the writer usually focuses on developing just one of the five P’s. In a novel, they are all represented. This is why there are so many discussion possibilities in novels and nonfiction narratives.
I’ve briefly discussed how these can be integrated into any language arts or journalism course, but I want to jump ahead now to what happens when, usually in junior year, they are finally masters of the content and ready to try it themselves with training wheels, aka the Literature Circle Study Contract and Group Evaluation Tools and Group Presentation.
As a practical matter, you need about five or six copies of six books for each class you teach—or be clever and rotate the unit with your other class to save money, and buy more selections. The up side is you might have to read a lot of contemporary fiction and consult with other teachers to come up with selections. (In Portland we have Writers In the Schools sponsored by Literary Arts, where writers teach in our classrooms, who are also excellent sources for recommendations.) It’s also possible a group might want to independently purchase their own book for Literature Circles, but they could also do that outside of school.
The way to engage students is to start in the present and show links to literature back in time that echo modern day themes. It hooks them and shows them how themes work and change over time.
I’m not saying you can’t teach Romeo and Juliet because it’s old; I am saying Shakespeare is still great because the themes of today can easily be represented in the plays today. And iambic pentameter is basically hip-hop rhythm. I was in middle school when I saw my first Shakespeare play with my brother at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.
An important part of my life has woven in and around OSF, which created its northern sister Portland Center Stage. They are now independent, but I volunteered for 29 years, gave tours, fed actors, took students to plays.
I met with Angus Bowmer when I was in college for a culminating project for a Shakespeare class. I was a Shakespeare Scholar at Ashland learning how to teach it when I was a young teacher. I started a journalism camp at Southern Oregon University where we took tours of OSF and saw plays for daily assignments.
I am just saying that I am up for a conversation about Shakespeare any time, any place. Iambic pentameter as a way to project the important words in theater before microphones? Voice acting in class instead of “reading”? Assigning fun scenes for students to act out in front of class after you’ve coached them how to have fun acting? When I say just do it, that’s what I mean.
At the end of the day, what we are all after are life-long readers, writers, and thinkers. For so many reasons. School should be the hands-on introduction to this world. And that’s just the beginning of the story.
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