The Power of the Short Story

Pushing my students to think deeply in a smaller space

At the beginning of this school year, I had a choice to make. In 2022, our district adopted a very popular, standardized reading curriculum in order to drastically improve student reading scores. Last year was a pilot year with the expectation being that teachers were encouraged to implement the new curriculum into their literacy instruction. This year, we are now required to use the reading curriculum’s basal reading passages to teach isolated reading skills and text comprehension.

I’m very familiar with this choice. At the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year, I decided to bring book clubs back into my classroom. We were only encouraged to implement the new reading curriculum, so even if it was only for one day a week, our book clubs could have been seen as supplementary rather than subversive. Thanks to author, B.B. Alston, students read Amari and the Night Brothers and their Socratic Readers Guilds were a success! These book clubs reminded me of the power of no-tech literature circles and annotating in our notebooks. In my opinion, discussing literature always trumps answering comprehension questions in a textbook.

Rejecting a district-wide, standardized reading curriculum isn’t easy. Despite the massive social media discussion over the whiteness of the passages, and the overwhelming teacher and student protests about the lack of authentic, meaningful, and culturally responsive reading materials, it is never easy to go against the grain.

I often reflect on this quote by one of my favorite educators, Dr. Christopher Emdin, from his book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too.

The way that a teacher teaches can be traced directly back to the way that the teacher has been taught. The time will always come when teachers must ask themselves if they will follow the mold or blaze a new trail. There are serious risks that come with this decision. It essentially boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the student.

When framed this way, do damage to the system or to the student, the choice is really not a choice at all. Will it be challenging and risky to buck the status quo? Yes. Will I get in trouble? Maybe. Is is worth it for the sake of my students? Every. Single. Time.

I think the most important thing I learned from my Socratic Readers Guild learning experiment was that students have lost their reading stamina. Educators have spent the last 14 years training students to be good test takers, not real readers. It makes sense, then, why my students last year struggled to engage with an entire novel. This year, I know why my students struggle to stay focused during silent reading. Students have been conditioned to read choppy passages and answer comprehension questions or define vocabulary instead of read, react to, and discuss literature with their peers.

This year, I knew that I needed to start small and work up to having students read an entire novel for book clubs. In August, I had an epiphany: what if I taught my fifth-grade class like an AP course? I was already bookmarking posts from Mrs. Bond and modifying teaching resources from Marcus Luther to use in my classroom (two phenomenal high school educators who regularly post insights to their pedagogy and free resources). I wanted my fifth-graders to have regular experiences with quality literature. I began searching for a better methodology and accessible texts I could use in my classroom.

The TQE Method

I told my students that this year, I would teach them how to read like an octopus. They were intrigued, and a bit confused, as we watched videos of octopuses solving puzzles and navigating around the ocean. Did you know that octopuses have three hearts?

Slide created by Marcus Luther

Marcus Luther adapted Marisa Thompson’s TQE Method for his AP high school students, using a octopus as a visual reminder for this close reading strategy. TQE: Thoughts, Questions, and Epiphanies gives students a concrete structure for reading text while allowing them the freedom to explore through individual small group and whole class curated inquiry. Luther’s octopus reminds students to be curious and exploratory while reading. I used a few short poems to introduce TQE to my students and they loved it! After a week, I was ready to introduce longer and more complex texts. I knew that I wanted literary texts, not choppy basal passages. I asked around online and found a three incredible short stories to read with my students.

Sticks by George Saunders

We started with Sticks by George Saunders. I was nervous about using a more mature story because ten-year-olds don’t get many chances to read texts geared toward mature readers. My main concern was that the story would be too difficult for them to read and the themes would be too complex for them to grasp. I was very wrong.

With some fantastic resources from Luther, I scaffolded the TQE Method so that students read Sticks multiple times, each time highlighting and recording their thinking. Throughout the story, we had incredible discussions about family, grief, authoritarianism, and forgiveness. I had never had such a rich discussion before using standardized reading materials. Textbook student “discussions” are little more than me asking prescribed questions and students responding with predetermined answers.

With Saunders’ short story, students were emboldened to really read the story, not just decode the text. The amount of significant details Saunders packs into his paragraphs makes each sentence feel intentional, and students immediately felt that this story wasn’t just a reading exercise, but a form of real human expression. This is reading!

Eraser Tattoo by Jason Reynolds

Feeling a bit more confident in The TQE Method and my students’ abilities to interact with good literature, I wanted our next short story to have more diversity. I love everything Jason Reynolds writes. He has an unwavering enthusiasm for getting young people to read. I found this great video he recorded about his tattoos and the significance of the stories attached to each one. Having students create a fictional tattoo (with an accompanying story) was a perfect hook activity before being introduced to Shay and Dante’s story.

Once again, my students amazed me with how they read, annotated, and responded to this story. It took us a week to read Eraser Tattoo¹, and in that time we had some great discussions about Shay and Dante and their relationship. The biggest question students wanted answered was about whether or not they remained in a long distance relationship or broke up. A few of my students were so invested in finding out that they wrote letters asking Jason Reynolds! Imagine the connection you have to feel to a story and its characters to ask the author about what happens after the last page.

Eraser Tattoo Note

Main Street by Jacqueline Woodson

Our most recently read short story was Main Street by Jacqueline Woodson. This is a beautiful story told with a complex narrative structure. I chose this story because I wanted to push my students a bit more and see how much of the TQE Method they could do on their own. As always, we read the story as a class and annotated together.

Our class annotations

Especially at the beginning, I wanted to make sure that students could follow the narrative, which includes unconventional dialogue (italics versus quotation marks, inner dialogue versus conversation), flashback, and complex imagery. As we read , I gradually removed my scaffolds so that students could show me more of their own thinking rather than our collective class thoughts, questions, and epiphanies.

A few student TQE Notecatchers

Main Street was a more challenging read, and some of my students struggled to explain their thinking or elaborate on how the story challenged their thinking. However, one thing is certain: my students are reading and discussing stories that are pushing them cognitively, emotionally, and academically. Even with more complex stories, I see my students thinking more critically about what they reading than I’ve ever observed with standardized basal reading materials. It’s not even a close comparison!

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Originally, I wanted to experiment with structuring my literacy instruction block as a an AP Literature course. AP students are treated as authentic readers who read, analyze, and discuss rigorous texts. My fifth-graders deserve to read rigorous and complex literature, analyzing and discussing novels with their peers. I never want to teach to standardized tests; I want to design more robust learning experiences for my students, providing opportunities for them to critically engage with meaningful texts.

I’m certain that I will need to continue using the TQE Method repeatedly. Learning takes practice and I want to make sure that my students are comfortable annotating any text they read. My goal is to slowly work our way into longer short stories so that I can help my students rebuild their atrophied reading endurance. I’m certain that at some point in the school year, I will be forced to break open the reading textbooks and have students complete some arbitrary reading exercise or assessment. When that happens, I hope our regular practice of reading, annotating, and discussing literature will help them successfully complete any reading task they are assigned. For now, I’m grateful for incredible writers who create masterful short stories, and teachers everywhere who are willing to share what resources they are using in their classrooms. We improve when we work together as a community of teachers to do what is best for our students.

Do you have any suggestions for great short stories or poems I can use with my students? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great week!

—Adrian

Resources

The Art of Annotation: Teaching Readers To Process Texts by Andrea Castelano

• This Cult of Pedagogy article is a gold mine for anyone new to annotations. It has a ton of high-quality and easy-to-implement resources for teachers to use.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times by Howard Zinn

• Howard Zinn has greatly influenced my pedagogical practice. If you only read one of his books, please read this one.

An Intentional Approach to Improving Your Teaching Practice by Marcus Luther

• I always go to Edutopia when looking for high-quality teaching resources. This particular article is written by Marcus Luther. In it, he does a wonderful job of describing the importance of making any new instructional strategy authentic to you and your students.

We’re Killing the Love of Reading, but Here's an Easy Fix by Marissa Thompson

• If you want to learn more about The TQE Method, I highly recommend you read Marissa Thompson’s blog. If you have the means, she offers a TQE Course for teachers. Professional learning where you get to be the student using a new strategy and discussing the methodology is one of the best ways to learn.

• This Teachers on Fire Substack podcast features Marissa Thompson discussing her TQE Method.

The Bradbury Challenge

• This could be a fun (or impossible!) challenge for some ambitious readers. In the video, Bradbury suggests reading a short story, an essay, or a poem every day for 1000 days.

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TL;DR

Stacking the Deck in Favor of How My Students Learn

The Socratic Readers Guild

Changing the way I teach writing

1. We had to stop once because a few students were trying to give themselves eraser tattoos!