High Expectations

During the final unit I taught at my placement, my cooperating teacher and I decided to introduce students to critical literary lenses, specifically the Marxist and Feminist lenses. Knowing that students had never had exposure to such analytical lenses or language, I knew it would be challenging to plan lessons and assignments that were comprehensible and applicable to our class text, but I was excited to do this work with students. Elizabeth Niver (2019) articulates the complexities and challenges of using literary lenses in the classroom, especially at the middle and high school levels. Niver explains that, too often, students are not taught how to use critical literary lenses until they reach college, and even then they are expected to already know what they are and how to use them in a language arts/ literature class. There are multiple stages needed in the process of learning these lenses: we must know what they are, who created them, and why they are relevant to readers and researchers today. Using Niver's guide to incorporating literary lenses into culturally relevant themes and texts in ELA classrooms, I planned a unit in which students would engage in self-guided discovery of the Marxist and Feminist lenses to analyze poetry in Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai.

To achieve the desired self-guided discovery, I began by introducing students to the concept of literary lenses using the imagery of a lens: eyeglasses, camera lenses, and magnifying glasses. In our class, literary lenses became the tools through which we read our class text; when we put on our Marxist lenses, we saw themes of power and social dynamics highlighted, and when we put on our feminist lenses, we saw themes of gender and identity highlighted. After a brief introduction from me about how we use critical lenses and which lens we would focus on that week, students broke into groups of four to collaboratively annotate a Google doc that outlined the main points of the week's lens and the questions we ask when looking through that lens. These annotations, also a practice new to students, were framed as silent conversations with one another and with the text itself. The following class, students continued to collaboratively annotate, but this time on a selection of three poems from our week's reading. Finally, at the end of the week, students wrote an analytical paragraph in which they used their annotations and silent conversations to answer a question relating to the themes highlighted that week. Pictured below are excerpts from silent conversations students held while learning about the Marxist theory. Here, we see students making connections between texts, pondering the contemporary implications of the Marxist theory, and making sense of complex ideas through conversation -- all crucial critical skills in reading and analyzing literature.

This unit changed the way I set expectations for my students. This was challenging work for both myself and my students, but I was open with students about why we were beginning this seemingly above-grade level work. I learned from this unit the power of high expectations and transparent communication with students. Although at first, many students were confused by the material and the process of annotating, discussing, and analyzing, after a week, they felt they had accomplished a challenge. When we restarted the routine the following week with a new lens, I noticed an ease and confidence with the work. As each week progress, I guided students to reflect on their classmates' work. We discussed what lends to productive and helpful conversation and how we can use our own annotations and those of others to help us write analyses later on. Through each step of this learning process, students were encouraged to "up their game," that is, to challenge themselves to push their thinking further by making connections, asking questions, and engaging in class discussion. In setting these high expectations for students and remaining supportive and honest throughout the self-guided journey, I learned the power of high expectations and challenging, yet scaffolded, work.