In an era of rigid curriculum requirements and standards, it may be difficult to cover everything a teacher would like to cover in a school year. I’ve approached College Prep Lit & Comp with two methods – one is to cover a wide range of material that will expose them to major literary figures of history, and two is to squeeze in other important works not currently outlined in the curriculum plan for the year.
To do this with the Victorian Period (our current unit that we are wrapping up), we covered the textbook poets and background information in a couple of weeks. We then read and watched the humorous play The Importance of Being Earnest to learn Wilde’s use of wit to comment on the social constraints of the Victorian Period.
I’m spending more time on this unit then suggested by the curriculum. However, for various reasons it is an instrumental time period in the growth of a global society during the reign of one of England’s most popular and renowned Queens. To cover two major novels of the time period, I am trying a new approach I heard about from Dawn Hogue (English teacher here). One class is reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and the other class is reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – two phenomenal novels written during the Victorian Period. We’re reading the first half of each book this week and discussing, and then the second half of each book next week. However, instead of each student reading an entire novel, they are only reading a portion and sharing their portion with their peers (jigsaw is the technique name). I’ve never done this approach with a novel, but am excited to see what happens in discussion. Ms. Hogue said when she and another teacher planned a unit like this, it worked well for building excitement and anticipation about the novel. If a student was reading chapters 10-12, for example, they would be pretty clueless as to what was going on. When they heard their peers explaining the previous chapters in group discussion, it would all start to click and make sense. What I am hoping to see is almost a circular discussion of the book as peers present on their sections and other groups start to put the book together.
We will be utilizing the moodle to share information with our peers the day after in-class discussion, allowing the two classes to encounter both texts through online engagement with their peers. The dependency on peers to understand the novel should hopefully build care and concern for doing a thorough job when presenting their section. Reading only 40 pages of a 500 page novel should hopefully be motivation to actually read each part well. We shall see…
