By high school, students need to become increasingly facile with language and literature, developing their vocabulary and reading increasingly complex texts. The Common Core State Standards call for students to engage in close reading activities that cultivate deep reading comprehension. In No More Telling as Teaching, Cris Tovani and Elizabeth Birr Moje make an important distinction about the practice of lecturing being “more efficient than effective.” They drive home the point that it’s important for students to learn “through a mix of classroom participation structures.” Over the past few decades, instructional practices have shifted away from teacher-as-lecturer and toward student-centered practices, collaborative opportunities, and inquiry-based approaches. I propose modeling the process of literary analysis through explicit mini-lessons that then lead into students’ own analysis. In Dialoguing Across Cultures, Identities, and Learning, Bob Fecho and Jennifer Clifton say that “education is about change-of minds, perspectives, values, understandings, meanings, selves-really all tools through which we construct cultures and identity.” With the right tools, literary analysis can provide the opportunity to engage students in activities that will shape their sense of themselves in the world, and provide them with opportunities to evolve through exploration of text and classroom discourse. This presents a unique opportunity for developing agency in students. One of the best ways to foster textual analysis is through meaningful classroom conversations.
Through direct instruction and multiple opportunities to grapple with texts, my students were able to analyze those texts more deeply and with more confidence. Students need to engage with the concepts in a variety of ways.
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