5 Strategies to Help Students Choose Useful Supporting Evidence
It’s relatively easy to get secondary students to make arguable claims in their writing. It is a whole lot more difficult to get them to support those claims with relevant supporting evidence that shows rather than tells the point they are attempting to make. This is especially difficult when we’re working on literary analysis.
Many of us have found some success teaching literary analysis by asking students to find examples of certain literary devices or engaging our students in class discussion, but when it comes time for our students to write their own analysis? Poof. All those ideas they could verbally articulate are gone, and we’re left wondering what happened.
We’ve often discussed how difficult it is to teach writing and shared our own struggles to get a handle on what worked best for our students. When Stephanie was introduced to the TEPAC paragraph writing frame, we thought we’d hit pay dirt. It seemed like such a great way to support our students, many of whom were second language learners, as they developed their writing and analysis skills. But when students applied this writing model to literature, we often ended up with a pile of repetitive, superficial essays.
We still shudder thinking of the year we asked our students to write about the theme of Disney Pixar’s Up and ended up with a stack of papers that just repeated the phrase, “Adventure is out there” for the topic sentence, evidence sentence, and paraphrase sentences of their paragraph. As with so much we do as teachers, it seemed like such a good activity as we planned it.
It was the Up debacle (along with a few others) that led us to hone in on helping our students select appropriate supporting evidence and revise the TEPAC model to provide students with a structure that would omit the repetition of ideas in multiple sentences; the results led us to our 5C paragraph model.
By eliminating the paraphrase sentence and replacing it with a context sentence, our students no longer repeated themselves, and we helped them to see the value of choosing “show not tell” supporting evidence that needed elaboration and explanation.
We’ve found that teaching students to choose quality supporting evidence is one of the best ways to help them improve their writing and literary analysis skills. We’ve narrowed it down to five strategies you can use in your classroom to help your students improve their choice of supporting evidence.
5 Scaffolded Strategies for Helping Students Choose Evidence
Pre-Select a Bank of Textual Evidence for Your Students
When your students are just learning how to write literary analysis, you might consider preselecting a number of quotations they can choose from to support their claims. By modeling what appropriate supporting evidence looks like, this ensures that, as your students learn to write commentary that connects their quotations to their claims, they will have strong quotations to work with.
Providing a variety to choose from allows students to have some ownership in the process (and gives you some variety when you’re grading). Ultimately, you want your students to choose quality text evidence themselves, but this can be a great first step.
How and When to Use this in Your Classroom
Ask Questions about Key Textual Evidence as Students Read
When we constructed guided reading assignments for our students, we tried to ask questions that would draw students’ attention to words, phrases, and sentences we thought they might be able to use as supporting evidence in their final writing assignment. By doing this, we primed students to be more likely to remember (read: be able to find) and select appropriate text evidence when it came time to write that final essay. (And the best part is they were proud of what they did because they thought they were choosing these quotations for themselves!)
In some cases, we specifically called out an important word or phrase (especially if we thought students might overlook it); in other cases, we asked them to provide their own evidence from a particularly rich paragraph that provided more than one suitable piece of supporting evidence.
Adopt “Show Not Tell” as a Mantra for Selecting Text Evidence
One of the biggest problems with students’ attempts at literary analysis is that they select quotations that restate, rather than exemplify or demonstrate, their point. When students do this, they limit their ability to write quality commentary because there’s not much to explain, so they end up repeating themselves. When we started requiring students to provide evidence that showed the truth of their claim, sending a “telling” quotation back for revision, the quality of their responses improved because they had more to work through in their analysis.
For example, if we asked them to write a paragraph describing a character, we required them to find evidence showing the character demonstrating the trait they identified in their claim. Then, when they wrote their commentary, they were able to explain how the actions exemplified the trait, leading to far more meaningful commentary.
Analyze Options for Supporting Evidence as a Class
Present students with a claim and several options for text evidence they could use to support that claim. As a class, discuss which quotation would work best to support that claim and why. This exercise works best when multiple pieces of evidence could support the claim and you’ve already introduced the “Show Not Tell” mantra because you can prompt students to explain why a “showing” quotation would work better than a “telling” quotation.
If students are having difficulty understanding the difference or why “show” evidence is preferable to “tell” evidence, ask them to consider what they would write about each quotation in their commentary sentence. They usually see the problem pretty quickly!
Limit the Number of Words Students Can Use as Textual Evidence
We’re going to preface this strategy by saying this approach does not always work, nor is it always appropriate. When we required students to use quotations that were only a few words (five or fewer), we forced them to pay closer attention to the specific words and phrases that conveyed their point, and they were more likely to see the connection between those specific words and their claim when they wrote their analysis.
We taught our PreAP students a method for integrating quotations that required them to weave single words and phrases from the text into their own writing, and as students became more adept at using this method, the quality of their writing and analysis improved significantly. This strategy is also particularly well-suited to selecting textual evidence to discuss in a poem.
What strategies have you found most successful when it comes to teaching literary analysis or considering how to develop writing skills in students? Have you spent time focusing on the importance of selecting quality text evidence? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works: we’re always looking for good strategies to help teachers improve writing instruction!