Literature Teaching
The great danger in Literature teaching is that students memorise your reading instead of learning to produce their own.
The dictated-notes problem
It is quick, it feels productive, and it is understandable under syllabus pressure: dictate the themes, the characters and a model answer, and move on.
The result is a class that can reproduce your reading and cannot handle a question worded differently. And examination questions are always worded differently.
The alternative takes longer per text but produces students who can answer any question — which is faster overall, because it removes the need to prepare a memorised answer for every possible question.
Teaching a text with a class
Read it whole, first, without stopping
Read it, or have it read, straight through. Analysis before the class knows the ending is analysis of the wrong things.
Establish what happens before what it means
A one-line summary of each scene or chapter, produced by the class, not given to them. It takes one lesson and it becomes their revision document.
Teach one moment closely
Take one passage and spend a whole lesson on it. What is the effect of this word? Why is this placed here? Students learn the method from one thorough demonstration far better than from ten summaries.
Ask them to find, not to receive
Find three moments that show the father's pride. Then compare what different students chose and argue about which is strongest. The arguing is the teaching.
Build answers together, on the board
Point, evidence, explanation, effect, link — written up sentence by sentence with the class supplying each part.
Then let them disagree with you
Invite a reading that opposes yours and require evidence for it. A class that has argued about a text can answer any question on it.
Practical techniques
For poetry
- Read aloud twice before any discussion, and have students read too.
- Ask where does the poem turn? before asking what it means.
- Give a poem with the last stanza removed; ask students to predict it, then compare. This teaches more about structure than any explanation.
- Ban the word nice, and ban the poet uses imagery without a following sentence.
For drama
- Stand it up. Two students, two chairs, one exchange. What an audience sees becomes obvious immediately.
- Ask who is on stage and silent? — it is the question students never think to ask.
- Play a scene twice with different staging and ask what changed.
- Insist on the audience rather than the reader in all written work.
For fiction
- Track one character across the text on a single sheet: where they start, what changes them, where they end.
- Compare the first page and the last page. This exercise answers a great many essay questions.
- Ask who is telling us this, and do we trust them? early and often.
For all texts
- Ten quotations per text, chosen for usefulness, learnt aloud.
- One full essay per text, timed, marked properly, one paragraph rewritten.
- Mark a specimen answer as a class — students who have marked once write differently afterwards.
Accuracy matters especially here
Never give a class a quotation you have not checked, a biographical fact you are not sure of, or a critical view you cannot source. Students reproduce what teachers say, in examinations, with confidence.
It has often been argued that… is honest and sufficient. An invented critic or a misremembered quotation is passed on to forty students at once.