Teaching with Short Stories: Your Helpful All-in-One Guide

Hunting men for sport. Kissing (steamily) a handsome pilot who doesn’t write when he says he will. Smoking marijuana with your wife’s blind friend who just had to stay at your home. Sounds like the pitch meeting for your favorite streaming service, right?

Before there was Netflix, there was the literature anthology, packed full of short stories featuring plots just like these. Teaching with short stories is not new to ELA teachers. It’s a powerful way to give your students lots of literary analysis practice and exposure to many interesting premises in the same amount of time it takes to read one novel. Essential for English teachers of all grades and levels, teaching with short stories leads to rich, memorable classroom discussions. You’ll be surprised by the insights your students share.

It can feel challenging, however, to figure out the best way to make teaching with short stories an effective part of your curriculum. What stories do you choose? How do you fit them in? What do you talk about? What strategies do you use to help your students develop their literary analysis skills? We’ve got you covered: consider this your guide to creating a short story lesson or unit you’ll really be proud of.

Why You Should be Teaching with Short Stories

For starters, short stories are . . . short. It’s no secret that everyone’s attention span is shrinking, exacerbating the short teenage attention spans educators have long labored to address. Many students lack the endurance needed for a novel, and while that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach novels (or work to build students’ endurance), teaching with short stories provides us the opportunity to accomplish similar learning objectives while increasing the chances our students will actually read.

This is especially helpful when you want to assign students a first and second read of a text. We know it’s necessary for quality literary analysis, but teaching with short stories makes this practice much more plausible.

Another advantage to teaching with short stories? The constraints of the genre require authors to be deliberate. When you’re trying to teach literary analysis to your students, it’s helpful to work with a text with minimal room for fluff: every element points toward the theme.

Once you’re on board with the idea of teaching with short stories, it’s important to select the stories that are going to be most effective in your classroom and with your students.

Selecting Short Stories for High School (or Middle School)

When it comes to looking for short stories to teach, there are a few things you’ll want to consider:

Length

Some short stories can be quite long. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t teach them, but if your audience is primarily made up of reluctant readers, you may want to use something shorter than, say, Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” to teach students about plot structure.

Your Purpose

If you’re just looking for an interesting story, anything will do, but most of us are trying to accomplish something specific with our selection, whether it’s answering an essential question or featuring a specific literary device our students need practice with.

Copyright

If you’re hoping to find a lesson or unit that comes with the full text of a story (especially if you like to embed your questions in the text), you’ll need to select a story in the public domain.

Your District’s Curriculum Guide

Be aware of what other teachers at your school (or your feeder schools) are teaching, especially if you’re expected to follow a curriculum guide. You don’t want to ruin another teacher’s lesson plan by teaching a story from their required list, and if you’re going for the element of surprise, you don’t want to hear multiple voices groan, “We read this laaaassst year.”

Mature Content

Short stories ripe for analysis tend to be written for adults, not middle or high school students. It’s important to know your students and the politics in your local community.

Engagement

While it’s sometimes important to teach a short story your students might not naturally be drawn to (looking at you, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”), you’ll have more success when you focus on stories your students enjoy, even if they have to put in some work (Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is challenging but extra chilling post-pandemic).

Lexile

On the one hand, Lexile doesn’t matter as much as you think. A good story is a good story, and advanced readers can do a lot with a text that looks “too easy.” On the other hand, you don’t want the Lexile level to pose an insurmountable obstacle to struggling readers. Don’t set your students up for failure or discouragement by selecting a text that’s way too hard for them (a little challenge is good!), but try not to allow simple vocabulary to keep you from teaching a rich, engaging story.

Need help getting started in your search?

Here are our favorites, organized by literary device:

short story recommendations

Blog - In the Classroom - Teaching with Short Stories: Your Helpful All-in-One Guide - teaching with short stories

Where Do I Fit Short Stories into My Curriculum?

You can, of course, teach short stories any time! Here, however, are the three most popular options:

The Short Story Unit

This was our personal favorite. We wanted our students to get repeated practice analyzing the elements of prose (in discussion and writing), so we focused on one literary device at a time, reading several short stories that relied on that technique to convey the theme. Many teachers use short story units to begin the year, reviewing the elements of prose before diving into novels.

Pro: Students explore a variety of themes, get repeated close reading practice, and really narrow in on the elements of prose.

Con: Students can get weary of the repeated practice.

The Essential Questions Unit

If you prefer to organize your curriculum by topics or essential questions, short stories make great supplements to the core texts in your unit. They’re a great way to present students with alternate answers to the question and invite them to join the conversation between texts with their own ideas.

Pro: The variety of texts keeps interest high and presents literature as an ongoing conversation.

Con: Students encounter specific literary devices at random, which might require more reteaching and less mastery.

The Time-Filler Lesson

Short stories are also a great way to fill in the gaps in your curriculum. When you have an awkward three days left before a holiday or before your next novel unit, or you need sub plans that won’t derail your larger unit, self-contained lessons on short stories keep students learning and practicing in the gaps.

Pro: It reduces wasted time in your classroom and makes sub plans easy.

Con: It’s not connected to a larger purpose in your curriculum, which can decrease student buy-in if they feel it’s just a time-filler.

The 6 Basic Elements of a Short Story

Students who can appropriately discuss these six elements have a good starter toolbox for analyzing prose independently.

Plot, or the sequence of events that make up a story: Any good literary analysis requires us to first understand what happens in the story.
Character, or a person, animal, or thing that helps to drive the plot forward: Characters give stories emotional resonance. The way characters deal with conflict and change (or don’t change) over the course of a story is like a neon arrow pointing toward a story’s theme.
Setting, or the time, location, and environment in which a story takes place: Most middle and high school students have no problem identifying time and place, but when we push them to consider the implications of that time and place, particularly cultural or historical context, their understanding of the story deepens.
Conflict, or a struggle (external or internal) between opposing forces: Not only does conflict drive the plot (and make it interesting), its resolution is another neon arrow pointing toward the all-important theme.
Point of View, or the perspective through which a story is told: Who tells the story makes a significant difference in how the story is told. The better students get at identifying the point of view and its contribution to the story, the stronger and more sophisticated their literary analysis will become.
Theme, or the unifying idea an author is trying to convey through a work: Theme is the star of any effective literary analysis. Students make a claim about the idea the author is trying to convey, and then they explain how the author used literary devices to convey that theme. In a good short story, the other five elements work together to do this. And since students can’t identify the theme until they’ve read the entire story, short stories that students can read in one sitting provide excellent opportunities for practice.

As your students master the basics, give them opportunities to grapple with more challenging literary devices like symbolism and irony that don’t occur in every short story. Look for short stories in which the author uses the six elements in unexpected ways. And, of course, ask your students to approach the texts with increasing independence, using the toolbox you’ve given them.

We’ve covered the basics: why to teach short stories, how to find them, when to incorporate them, and what to make sure your students have in their toolbox. Now we get to consider the how.

Topics for Class Discussion When Teaching Short Stories

Our favorite part of teaching short stories is the rich classroom discussions, but it takes a little bit of work to come up with just the right discussion questions. While it can be helpful to ensure your students have the basic plot down (especially in a more challenging text), comprehension questions don’t generally lead to particularly memorable discussions.

Instead, we like to focus on questions that allow us to push our students to think more deeply, questions that students would struggle to answer on their own, questions that might have more than one answer, and questions that point directly toward a story’s theme (which we would then ask students to identify).

Sample Questions

Was the surprise ending fairly achieved?
Why didn’t the author tie up all the loose ends neatly? What might the author be suggesting by using an ambiguous ending?
How would you characterize [insert character’s name here]? (This might seem like a pretty straightforward question, but it’s a great opportunity to push students to support their claims with evidence from the text and go beyond the superficial with complex characters.)
Are the characters’ relationships truly what they seem?
How does the point of view affect our understanding of the events?
Can we trust the narrator to tell us the truth?
The author seems to bring up X a lot. Why do you think this is? What might the author be trying to say?

Strategies for Teaching Short Stories

Teaching short stories is not much different from teaching any other text when it comes to strategy, but it is an especially good place to focus on close reading and writing literary analysis paragraphs.

Here’s is a list of things we like to include when we approach teaching with short stories.

Introduce the text in a way that makes the story accessible to students.
Ensure students know the vocabulary and literary devices they need to make sense of the text. With our younger students, we often taught key literary devices in an engaging mini-lesson before tackling the short story itself.
Assign guided reading questions that check for understanding and help your students focus on key parts of the text.
Provide opportunities for discussion of challenging questions like the ones above, whether as a full class or in small groups.
Require students to use specific quotations and details from the text to support their responses in both the guided reading questions and discussion. This is the time for close reading, not generalizations.
Ask students to write a theme paragraph, in which they make a claim about the story’s theme and support it with quotations and commentary. If you’re focusing on a specific literary device, require students to use that literary device. This can be completed individually or in groups: we were pleasantly surprised at the growth in our students’ writing when they completed group paragraphs regularly.
Assess students at the end of the unit, focusing less on basic comprehension and more on their understanding of the key literary devices, themes, and insights drawn out in discussion. If you’re teaching multiple short stories back-to-back, quizzing them on each story independently just creates more work for you!

While they may sound like boring English teacher stuff, short stories offer plenty of excitement and can provoke spirited class discussions (arguments?). No matter how experienced you are at teaching short stories, we hope you’re coming away from this post with at least one new idea for finding short stories, incorporating them into your curriculum, focusing on key elements, or testing out a new strategy.

What questions do you still have about teaching short stories? Anything you think we got right, or . . . (gasp) wrong? Reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works. Have a colleague who’s struggling to build their own short story unit? Pass this along and share the wealth.