Is There a ‘Right’ Way to Teach a Novel?

However, this year, my co-teacher and I noticed that our ICT classes seemed to need more overt instructions and explicit teaching. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they were not grasping concepts that we have not always had to explain. This dilemma isn’t new—even in the pre-pandemic world of 2019, I wrote “Balancing Guided Reading and Authentic Discovery.” Post-pandemic, my co-teacher and I agree that there is a benefit to more explicit teaching and frontloading, especially for students who struggle academically. We started reading The Outsiders in December, and we’ve spent a few weeks preparing them for this by having them do a WebQuest about the 1960s; and then we pulled model slides from their projects and pre-taught them using their research in this Collaborative Student Slideshow. Then they completed Edpuzzles, which provide direct instruction and checks for understanding; and today we shared with them some clips about the setting and background  (spoiler alert after about seven minutes, so be aware!) and an interview with S.E. Hinton about the new Broadway release. 

What’s interesting is that my Honors ELA 8 classes had requested that we read our novels this year without all of the pre-reading activities, and they wanted to read them straight through instead of stopping and starting. I’ve taken a kind of constructivist approach to the Honors classes, as I am only in my second year of teaching them. The students argued that they love to read, so all of the quizzes after each chapter or answering comprehension questions ruined books for them. I agreed we’d give it a try, and earlier this year we read Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down, which you can read about here. That proved to be pretty successful, so I assigned students to read The Outsiders, on their own, in a little over a week. Instead of providing all of the frontloading, they got to experience the novel in a less contrived way. We did this student-led discussion as the very first activity of the novel, where we began to lay the groundwork for a compare/contrast essay between the two books. All in all, I think they enjoyed The Outsiders, and I’m confident their compare/contrast essays will be very good. However, today, I stumbled across a situation that has me wondering which approach is “better.”

In one of the videos my ICT classes watched today, S.E. Hinton points out that she’d read somewhere that you can tell a theme from the very first page of a novel. She went on to say that she thought this was true of Ponyboy, as the novel begins, “When I stepped out into the sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.” She explained that Ponyboy does, by the end, step out from the darkness, and that he is focused on both reality—needing a ride home—and his imagination about Paul Newman, demonstrating how he kind of lives between the two worlds. I thought this was brilliant, of course, and my mind was spinning with this idea as my Honors students came in the next period. 

That’s when it hit me. I asked them: “Do any of you know who Paul Newman is?” Crickets. My heart sank. How could they fully appreciate the novel without understanding the significance of the first (and last line) of the novel? I haven’t been able to shake this question, and I decided to think it through in writing this blog. Is one way of “reading” better than the other? Had I missed an opportunity by not frontloading the novel for my stronger readers? I’m not sure. This situation prompts the question: Why do we read? Is it to experience the novel as it unfolds, with our own knowledge, or is it important to know the world we enter into as readers? 

Maybe the answer is both. I’ve never taught a novel twice. I’ve circled back to something that was important, but I’ve never told students to read a novel and then curate it for them to add depth to their experience. How do you teach novels? Why do you teach them? In a tumultuous political climate, where there are calls for books to be banned, perhaps I’m a little more reflective about this question. I’d love to hear your take on this topic! Please share your thoughts in the comments or on social media @MsAmberChandler on the social platform X and Bluesky, and AmberRainChandler on Instagram and Threads.