CAN BE USED WITH ANY NOVEL, DRAMA OR SHORT STORY AT ANY LEVEL!!!
This engaging and interactive team analysis exercise helps students synthesize, shore up and enrich what they’ve gleaned from ANY literary text after they’ve read it in its entirety. It is a great way to review and walk through a text upon its completion with the entire class re-constructing it together. Student teams are asked to “build” their analysis for an assigned portion of the text, so new meaning is manufactured both within their teams and as an entire class.
Preparation and presentations might take approximately 5-6 days, depending on duration of class periods, length of text & presentations, and ensuing discussions. A typical schedule might look like:
Day 1: Introduce project & begin teamwork (students divide & conquer)
Days 2-3: Teams continue & finish work.
Days 4-6: Presentations in order (e.g. by chapters or acts or sections of text)
- Having just completed your class reading experience, it may seem daunting to add on another week or more. However, these presentations encourage students to more deeply interact with the text and with each other, providing greatly enhanced understanding in the end. They also afford you, the teacher, ample opportunity, during both prep and presentation phases, to guide and clarify. Also, building in a bit of extra time during presentations should afford you opportunities to debrief and check for understanding.
- The metaphor, “Loud Lines” (powerful passages), and graphing elements of this project have the opportunity to greatly enhance interpretation, discussion and analysis. This should be evident in student interactions within the teams, themselves, AND between presenters and audience (via Q&A), so leaving more “breathing room” in the schedule is encouraged. If, however, you feel you’ve accomplished deep analysis during your reading/viewing, then the schedule can certainly be truncated.
- Splitting responsibility for a larger chapter/act across two teams or assigning the same section to more than one team can also create more discussion and interaction opportunities. This is especially interesting when teams’ analyses differ for the same portion of text. Remember, however, more teams will always require more presentation time.
- It’s also recommended and productive to require teams to field any questions from the class related to their portion of the text after their presentation ends.
NOTE: The enclosed presentation rubric uses 5 elements with a possible 4 points each, totaling 20 points. (This should allow for an easy calculation to 100%.)