Teaching Strategies from Teaching Tolerance

While there were many different strategies provided to incorporate into my teaching of All American Boys, especially strategies that are grade-specific to what I plan to teach (grades 6-12), the one I found most interesting was “Text Graffiti,” which is when the students explore specific quotes and excerpts, picked by me, from the novel and try to predict what they mean, what themes they involve, and how they relate to the overall story. I think it would be a great before and after reading strategy for this particular text, because I think there are so many powerful quotes that give insight into what sorts of themes the novel will explore as well as promote critical thinking about how the student feels about that theme. I also believe it challenges the students to really consider what each word in the quote or excerpt mean in order to provide a greater understanding of what is going to happen. This strategy also allows the students to draw from their lived experiences, which can be very enriching for their peers who probably don’t have the same experiences, or, if they do, they are given the opportunity to relate to that classmate.  

I would like to use this strategy as a way of engaging with the text prior to reading the novel. Students will view the quotes in front of them and comment on each quote by talking about how the quote makes them feel, what they think it means, and how it applies to everyday life before they are told by the authors what it all actually means. This way, the students are actively using different skills to draw and create conclusions, of which they will later confirm or correct after they’ve read the book.  

As stated by Beuhler in chapter one of Teaching Reading with YA Literature, “In addition to handing students good books, we must give students engaging and meaningful things to do with books” (11). These strategies support this idea of YA pedagogy in that it they are all great examples of ways to engage our students and get them excited as well as thinking critically about what they’re reading.