Q: I have to use a curriculum that doesn't focus on genre, but rather themes. There are poems, articles, and fiction in each collection. What's the best way to address this in terms of skills? I feel like it's not natural. - Josie
A: I’m so glad you asked this question, Josie, because I easily forget that not everyone teaches in genre-based units.
I asked Josie for more specifics so I could better envision the texts given to her to teach. Here’s one example:
So my next required unit is called The Legacy of Anne Frank. It consists of reading the play (elements of drama and characterization), an excerpt from her actual diary, a speech by Elie Wiesel called After Auschwitz (supposed to analyzed persuasive techniques), a poem called There but For the Grace, and an informational article (literary criticism) called Anne Frank: The book, the Life, the Afterlife (for author's viewpoint). It's just a group of texts all connected by topic which makes genre study difficult. Each kind of writing is so different! Thanks for offering to help.
To be honest, I felt overwhelmed reading this.
Josie, I want to get this right, but I’m not sure I will. Having never done this myself (at least not with this intensity and focus), I can’t give you a tried-and-true way that works like a charm. But let me share some ideas with you that I hope will help.
Why Does It Even Matter if We Focus on Skills?
I’m asked this question more than you might expect, and I think one of the biggest reasons is that this is not the way you and I were taught. We were taught content. It was Very Important for us to know the specific details of specific texts so we could be Well-Read Adults. So we could talk about The Scarlett Letter at a cocktail party — which is an argument I’ve heard many times and still have yet to actually do in my adult life Even at English teacher cocktail parties.
We must teach students reading and writing skills because …
This is the way the standards are written! While curricula and pacing guides in your locality might demand (or restrict) specific texts, standards are skill-based. So, if we are going to teach our standards, we have to focus on skills.
Skills are transferable, texts are not. It’s great to be an expert on The Scarlett Letter (I guess), but that doesn’t make you an expert on any other book. That’s why college English professors have areas of speciality — expertise on Beowulf doesn’t quality you to teach Modernist Lit. We want our students to be adept readers and thinkers about any text they encounter in the future. So they needs skills to do that.
Managing Skills- Based Instruction in a Content-Heavy World
In a way, thematic units are more beneficial than genre-based units for practicing and re-practicing and re-re-practicing skills again and again over time. It’s more natural to envision introducing a skill and then practicing it again in the next unit (and, in the case of reading, you can always circle back to previously-taught skills in independent reading!) .
It’s kind of like Kittle and Gallagher’s “laps”. But extended across a semester or a year.
The metaphor of a staircase makes sense in my head: