Your Literacy Standards Companion, Grades 9-12. Jim Burke
examine what those conflicts reveal about the characters and how they affect the text as a whole.
To have students analyze how key characters advance or develop plots or themes, do the following:
Ask students to locate specific passages or key moments in the text where complex characters do or say something that affects the plot or develops a theme; have them make a claim about how the character affects the text, providing examples and textual evidence.
Create a graphic chart or plot diagram with students and ask them to analyze the plot for moments when characters do something that affects the plot—increase tension, cause change—in a measurable, discernible way. This is sometimes called a “fever chart” to represent the rising and falling action of events in the story.
To have students analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding story elements, do the following:
Have students list the key choices the author makes about setting, plot sequence, and character development; evaluate all of those within one such category to identify those that impact the story the most, and then examine how and why they do.
Identify key elements in a story and have students change, remove, or otherwise alter some of these elements to understand how they function within or affect the story.
To have students analyze how complex ideas or events interact and develop over time, do the following:
Have students determine which ideas are central to the text and then examine how the words, tone, or imagery used shift over the course of the text to affect the meaning or content of the text.
To have students analyze a series of events where earlier ones caused later ones, do the following:
Have students create a timeline for the text—a list or a more graphic timeline—that shows all the events in sequence, evaluated or ranked by their importance or effect on later events.
Have students highlight or use sticky notes to identify all references to an event so students can retrace the events after reading the document to evaluate how one led to or impacted another.
To have students evaluate various explanations for events in light of textual evidence, do the following:
Provide students a sample that shows the event, its explanations and textual evidence, which students must learn to evaluate by identifying the most fitting explanations and evidence. Then have them find the next event, its explanation, and evidence so they show they can do this independently.
Give students the event or action without the explanations or evidence; then tell them to read the text to find the best explanations and textual evidence; to extend the lesson, have them explain why their explanations and evidence are the best.
To have students analyze the specific results based on explanations in the text, do the following:
Show students how to find and analyze results from their inquiries based on the criteria, legends, or other explanations
Demonstrate for students how you do this with results from a similar or previous experiment.
To help your English Language Learners, try this:
Evaluate the language used in the text, any directions for the assignment, and when discussing the assignment in class, find ways you could make the assignment more accessible.
Preparing to Teach: Connections to My State’s Standards
Common Core Reading Standard 3: Academic Vocabulary: Key Words and Phrases
Actions or events: To understand “actions” think of the verbs your students study: rebel, discover, invent; events are those landmark moments in history or any other field when things change in ways that merit time spent studying them (war, social movement).
Advance the plot: A story is a bit like a football or basketball game in that every move should be toward the goal; so with a story, every event or detail should advance the story in some useful or meaningful way toward its ultimate purpose or resolution.
Complex characters: Characters can be simple (flat, static) or complex (round, dynamic); only characters who change, who have a rich inner life that interacts with people and their environment could be considered “complex.” This is often represented as an arc: what they are like or where they are when the story begins and when it ends.
Complex set of ideas or sequence of events: Consider the Industrial Revolution during which a range of ideas and events created the conditions for a new era, or think of a specific sequence of events that led to the Civil Rights Act or Emancipation Proclamation.
Connections that are drawn: Often it is the unexpected connection the author makes between ideas, events, or characters that leads to the greatest insight for us when reading. We could not anticipate that two elements that seemed so separate could be so linked; this is the epiphany that comes from attention to detail.
Determine: This act requires the reader to recognize the different possibilities, choices, and elements available to the author, then decide what effect the author’s choice had on the text.
Develop and interact: As stories unfold, characters change in response to events and experiences—interactions with people and ideas. Through these interactions characters evolve.
Develop the theme: A theme is best understood as a phrase that expresses an idea (e.g., the hope for things unseen, being “a brother’s keeper”) the text, in whatever form, examines. The author “develops the theme” by adding details, examples, events, or commentary related to this theme; in more complex texts, there is often more than one theme.
Evaluate various explanations: In examining historical events and their interpretation, students should learn that there are inevitably competing views about the meaning, importance, or rationale of an event or action (e.g., dropping the atomic bombs on Japan in WWII). Students must learn to determine, by criteria they create or receive from others, which explanation is the most viable.
Impact of author’s choices: A text is a created or woven construction: Every choice—of time sequence, words, setting, characters, their names, the grammar and imagery—affects the reader, the meaning of the story, and the characters’ development.
Motivations: This refers to what characters want most of all; such desires are often complicated by other, often competing, motives that complicate the character whose desires may conflict with his ideals.
Performing technical tasks attending to special cases: In a science or technical subjects class, one performs “technical tasks” when they experiment in a lab or with models; those tasks attending to (i.e., dealing with or done as a result of) special cases would be the more complex tasks because of their unique conditions that invite exceptions or innovative approaches to solving the problem.
Unfolds an analysis: This refers to the author’s approach or how she proceeds when laying out and developing an argument, its reasons, supporting evidence, and other related details.
Where the text leaves matters uncertain: “Leaving matters uncertain” implies a lack of understanding or resolution in some area about what is true, what it means, why it happened, or whether