Today in my Junior English class we finished an important part of the novel, and we are now a third of the way through. A lot of important information has been presented, and in the book, the setting and mood will soon change dramatically. It is at parts of books like these that my students really seem to become lost and anxious. It is also during this part that I seem to have a really hard time helping them. To attempt to counteract this potential problem, I decided to take a lot of extra time today summarizing and checking for reading comprehension.
I looked up an activity on NCTE's readwritethink.org, that suggested having students title chapters themselves (they suggested that this particularly becomes effective when the book has chapters that have not been named already, which was perfect for our purposes since Catcher in the Rye is all numbered chapters). The titling of the chapters had to be based in the understanding a summation of major points within the text.
It started out well enough, I began by asking them titles of their favorite songs, movies, albums, books (ha), what have you. Then we broke down criteria that the creator of these things must have used to come up with their title. Once we had established some boundaries, I divided up the chapters and students so that each group was responsible for about two of them. With each title, I expected an explanation and a rationale.
The students got right to work, and didn't seem to have too much confusion with the task, but as I was walking around checking on progress, I found myself slightly disappointed by responses. I was getting a lot of responses like "Ch: Pencey Prep. Reason: In this chapter Holden discusses what it is like at his school Pencey for quite some time, including what the people are like and how he is going to be kicked out because of his poor grades"
Yes, that is what happens in that chapter. Yes, titling it that would then make a lot of sense. But it was just so...uninspired?
One group was more in line with what I had been thinking by calling a chapter "Goodbyes and the nasty bumpy old man chest" I thought this was a good way of introducing Holden's last exchange with Mr. Spencer, because that seemed to be what Holden was REALLY focusing on. Other groups just called this "Mr. Spencer" and went on to explain.
Both correct. One a lot more congruent with my expectation. Since this is a simple class assignment and I was more explicit with the summary anyway, this is what they will really be assessed on this time around. In the future however, I wonder, how I could give my directions in such a way that could better show this sort of extremely subtle expectation?
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Assessing for Creativity
Naming chapter’s sounds like it has the potential for a great activity.
I’ve had the same-thing come up in my class before. Some students invest themselves in the project and come up with some truly creative as well as insightful things to say about the text. Others due the bare minimum. I have to tell you though that I can’t really blame the ones that do the bare minimum, because they know and I know that they have completed the assignment and will receive the same grade as people that have invested their creativity in addition to mental-effort into the assignment. What’s a teacher to do?
While it is both difficult and tough to inspire students to be creative I feel that if you make room for this relatively vague quality in your rubric that you can grade for this and force the bare-minimum students to overcome their mental lethargy plus work their creative muscles.
You may want to consider creating a rubric for this assignment the next time around. Making this a graded assignment I feel will put more of a fire in the pants of some of your lackadaisical students.
You may also want to consider revising the assignment. I really like the creativity that you allow for in this assignment, but as you know when the rubber meets the road, best intentions, etc., things don’t always go as planned. You need to create a higher stakes “buy in” for your students. Perhaps, if you gave each student/group just one chapter, but you had them come up with three different names for each chapter. For example, have students come up with one example that is wacky, another that is poignant and another that is abstract. I also feel that if you develop a rubric for this and model an example in front of the class students may get a better idea of what you are after. If you also add that the students will create a poster-board of their chapter title, present these to the class and have their poster hung up in the class it may create more of an incentive for students to take authorship of their chapter titles.
I hope that some of this is helpful. I am finding that there are some assignments that I really want students to get creative with and that there are others that I don’t care too much about. Grading to a rubric, having students present and giving them alternative opportunities to succeed has given me the best results so far.
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