Students will learn about different methods writers use to create direct and indirect characterization.
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo (2018)
ELAGSE11-12RL2: Determine two or more themes or central ideas of text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
ELAGSE11-12RL3: Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).
Characterization, textual evidence, inference, implicit/explicit
This lesson occurred in the first week of our Fiction unit, which we used as a transition period to go over some basics of reading and understanding fiction before getting into our core text. Since I'd noticed that students tended to get interested in characters more quickly than plot or writing style, I wanted to start off by talking about characterization. The previous day, our lesson had focused on introducing the main types of direct and indirect characterization, using our independent reading books. However, because there are so many different aspects of how characters are described and developed, I wanted to find some more clear-cut structures that would help us focus on one piece at a time as we continued to work with these ideas. While I was mulling over how to do this, I started thinking about the main way that I have used my knowledge of literary characterization in real life: the role-playing tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons.
When you start off playing a D&D game ("campaign"), you have to create a character and document all of their skills, characteristics, and background on one single sheet. It's very comprehensive, but also very space-efficient. And besides, I always had fun doing it, and I hoped that some of my kids might be familiar with it too! In a real campaign, a complete character sheet might look something like this, but this game-standard version includes a lot of stuff that wasn't relevant to the text I wanted to teach. Instead, I decided to create my own version in Canva.
Here's the front side of the character sheet [materials here]:
And here's the back side, which we worked on simultaneously to collect textual evidence:
As you can see, these sheets are clearly chunked up into 5 sections, each focusing on a set of poems. I chose to work with The Poet X for this lesson, but this structure would be easy enough to shift around to use with most any fiction work. For example, you could divide sections by page numbers for short stories, or chapters for novels, or even skip/add on/divide sections.
I wanted to work with The Poet X for several reasons. First, I thought it would be a good "mirror" text for my large number of Hispanic students in regards to family dynamics and home culture (which makes it a "window" for non-Hispanic students as well). Second, it would be an even broader "mirror" for all of my students as 16-to-18-year-olds in the same stage of life as the speaker. Third, as a collection of short poetry written in modern, casual language, the pieces would be relatively quick and easy reads, giving us more class time to spend on discussion after reading.
I wanted to give my students some choice in this activity by allowing them to pick whether to work with a partner or by themselves, but I didn't want partners to just copy each other's work (which was an issue I ran into during a partner activity the previous week...). To facilitate this, I went through the book and collected 11 poems that focused on the speaker, Xiomara, and her twin brother, Xavier, also looking out for ones with the strongest examples of characterization [materials here]. That way, one partner would be assigned to focus on the first sibling, and the other partner on the second.
The general idea was that we would read a couple poems together, discuss what inferences we could make based on characterization we saw, and use that discussion to help us fill out one section of the character sheet. On the back of their sheets, students would also have to write down one specific quote that supported an inference from that section. For the first section, I explained and modelled the entire thing on my own, asking for just a little student input. We worked on the second section more as a group, and from then on students were asked to lead the discussions.
Here's how I broke down the lesson in my slides:
Most of the sections are pretty self-explanitory, but I think 2 and 5 need the be given the same context I had to explain during class. Section 2 shows a "spider chart," which is used for comparing different qualities by plotting and connecting points on a common scale. Completed, it might look like this. Section 5 shows a "moral alignment chart," which is used to orient and compare people/character's ideologies and actions. More thorough explanation of each category (as well as a self-test) is available here.
After reading all the poems and working through the entire sheet, I wanted to assess their learning for both comprehension and application of ideas. We did the application first, where I asked them to write a paragraph in their journals imagining their character in a particular situation. Their journals were private unless they wanted to share, so students only had to explain their ideas verbally if they volunteered. This was more intended as a first dip into the kind of story-writing we would get into more later in the semester. We did a quick comprehension assessment at the start of the next day, where I asked them to write a short paragraph summarizing what they knew and inferred about their character, including at least 2 quotes as supporting evidence.
Here is a sample of what one of my students wrote that shows a strong understanding of summary and inferencing:
Xiomara Batista is spanish speaking female who lives with her younger brother and mom. Xiomara is way stronger and has more wisdom than her younger brother Xavier. In the passage she says "I would come home with bleeding knuckles." That quote shows that she has a lot of strength. Xiomara really just want her brother to at least look at her or acknowledge her. "He rarely lifts his eyes from the page to know that im here at all."
Here's a sample from another student who repeatedly adds in their own opinions without support from the text. In this case, it was a good signal to show me that this was someone to check in with more frequently as we continued to work on inferencing:
xiomara is a teen Spanish speaking girl, she is kinda jelelous cause her brother is smarter than her. xiomara doesn't have confidence in herself but if she put her mind to it she can gain self confidence. xiomara is a fighter, she come home with bloody knuckles but it sound like she still b getting beat up.
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