Engraining the Art of Analysis: Teaching Students to Dig a Little Deeper

1. Engraining the Art of Analysis: Teaching Students to Dig a Little Deeper Joey Littrell Southwestern Pulaski County High School English Department EKUWP 2012 Summer Institute June 24, 2014

2. Think-Write-Share (≈3 min.) • Why is it important for students to learn how to analyze? • What does analysis look like in your classroom?

3. Essential Questions for the next ≈67 minutes… • How do we go about teaching students to analyze effectively? • How can we scaffold lessons to push students toward a higher level of analysis? http://littrellwritingproject.weebly.com/demo.html

4. Why analyze? • To know why you believe what you believe • To learn critical thinking skills essential for participating freely in a democracy • We want our students to be leaders, not followers (or at least to be well-informed followers). • To determine the importance and relevance of information • To determine purpose, reflect upon message, and apply to our own experiences

5. “The student of literature who hides in the crowd or parrots the thinking of classmates, who learns only to paraphrase the critical judgments of scholars or to memorize peripheral information about the authors’ lives and historical periods, has not begun to learn the literature. Those parroted observations and memorized judgments reflect not less learning, but no learning whatsoever.” ~Probst, Robert E. Response and Analysis: Teaching Literature in Secondary School. “The Reader and other Readers.” 2nded. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2004. 73.

6. Evidence Analysis (≈10 min.) • Each group has received a different article or passage to read. • Read the article or passage, either individually or as a group. • Find two direct quotes from the article or passage which tell us something (directly or indirectly) about the person you read about. Write each quote (with citation) on one side of an index card (you will have two cards, one for each quote). • On the back of the card, explain the quotation—basically, “What do you think this quote tells us about the person? Why is it important?” • See the back of the assignment sheet for an example.

7. Evidence Analysis • On-going activity as we read (great for formative assessment) • Exit-slip • Quick group activity • Discussion • Can be used with short excerpts or longer passages

8. So, since we’re scaffolding analysis… • Think of the person you read about in the previous activity. • Now, imagine performing an autopsy on that person’s character. What does that person deem important? What motivates that person? How would you portray this to someone else?

9. Post-Mortem of a Protagonist (or Body Biography) • Researched and promoted by Laying the Foundation • Forces students to think outside the proverbial box • Allows students to create information based upon textual evidence and to present this information to their peers and other school personnel • Cognitive and Social Best Practice: students work together to create their own information and communicate through writing, speaking, drawing, and visual arts.

10. Best Practice • Cognitive: Students create their own information and communicate through writing, speaking, drawing, and visual arts. They make choices about the content of their final product, are interactive with the text they are analyzing, and present their findings to others. • Social: Students work in groups to discuss the text and its nuances, to make decisions about representing the text, and to present their information to peers.

11. Post-Mortem Analysis of ________.(≈30 minutes) • Each group will need: • An assignment sheet • One sheet of poster paper • Crayons and/or markers • The article/passage you read about your character • The index cards you used for the Evidence Collection activity

12. You are going to create a symbolic representation of the person you read about based on what you have read. • Example: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 • Choose five of the body parts on the assignment sheet to represent the person you read about. • On your poster paper, draw a body outline, then begin using colors and drawing symbols to represent each of the body parts you chose. Remember to justify your decisions. • In your group, create the “Found Poem” using the article or passage you read. • Be ready to share your poem and artwork with the rest of us!

13. Take the information you gathered from completing the “Evidence Collection” and “Post-Mortem” activities and write a well-developed paragraph analyzing the person you read about. Don’t forget to support your answer. Once you have finished, share with the person next to you. (≈5 min.)

14. “Instruction in literature should enable readers to find the connections between their experience and the literary work. If it does so, it may enable them to use the literature, to employ it in making sense of their lives.” ~Probst, Robert E. “Dialogue with a Text.” The English Journal 77.1. (Jan. 1988): 32-38. JSTOR. Web. 14 June 2012.

15. “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.” ~Sir Arthur Conan Doyle What implications does this quotation have for our teaching?

16. Works Cited • Probst, Robert E. “Dialogue with a Text.” The English Journal 77.1. (Jan. 1988): 32-38. JSTOR. Web. 14 June 2012. • ---. Response and Analysis: Teaching Literature in Secondary School. “The Reader and other Readers.” 2nd ed. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2004. 73.

17. Resource • Excellent source for critical reading strategies • http://www.bcps.org/offices/lis/models/tips/analyzing.htm