Why Teaching with Movies and TV Shows is Essential

Steph kind of hates The Lion King. We know. Bold statement for someone who attended elementary school in the 90s.

But for years, it was THE movie to show in class. Rainy day, substitute, busy teacher . . . no problem! Pop in Simba, Pumbaa, and Timon. And it’s not like there was a clever lesson connecting Simba and friends to whatever we were studying: it was just another showing of the same old movie.

It’s experiences like this that give “movie day” a bad rap. People hear “movies in the classroom” and immediately jump to conclusions about supposedly lazy teachers who mindlessly pop in a movie because they’re too tired to teach.

But teaching with movies (and TV shows) shouldn’t have a bad rap. In the 21st century, we should be teaching with movies in most classes, but especially ELA classes.

Teaching with movies in a thoughtful way that engages our students with the curriculum and allows them to practice key skills in a comfortable context can be a powerful tool. Facilitating learning in a variety of situations using a variety of resources is an increasingly essential part of being a successful English teacher. 

We’re guessing you’re already kind of on board with the idea of teaching with movies, but if you need some reassurance or inspiration, keep reading.

Why You Should Be Teaching with Movies and TV Shows

Teaching with movies and TV shows is engaging.

Student engagement has long been an educational buzzword, but post-pandemic, teachers are desperate to find new and creative ways to engage students. We saw our students increasingly disengage from school over our years in the classroom, and students have only become more emboldened and brazen in their unwillingness to engage at school since 2020.

We all know our students are more engaged when we show movies and TV shows, but as we face increasing pressure to engage uninterested students, this is common sense we should do something with. Our students will spend hours in front of a phone screen watching YouTube videos, so if embracing that preference allows us to teach them something, then maybe it’s worth leaning into.

Students aren’t reading.

What to do with students who don’t read has long been one of an English teacher’s daily battles, but students’ apathy toward reading is only growing. Many teachers have given up assigning reading as homework and do all the reading in class. Many have given up assigning full novels and only work with short texts and excerpts. History and science teachers often don’t bother with the book anymore, and Steph can’t tell you how many tutoring clients haven’t cracked open their textbooks (if they even know where to find them).

Should students read? Of course. Should we do everything we can to get students to read? Absolutely. But sometimes, it’s just not worth the battle if we can accomplish our goal another way. To be clear, we’re not saying, “Don’t assign reading.” We’re saying, “Maybe instead of reading three novels, you do two novels and a film unit.”

Movies and TV shows tell stories.

One of the reasons movies and TV shows are so beneficial to us as English teachers is that they still tell stories and, in many respects, function the same way written texts do. (Plus, we teach plays, and aren’t those just movies performed live?) We can teach theme, character development, setting, symbolism, and point of view with movies. We can teach students to make claims and support them with evidence. We can do all kinds of writing lessons based on movies and TV shows.

Movies also have their own stylistic techniques and conventions, and when we engage our students in discussions about how those techniques convey meaning, we’re still teaching literary analysis.

Movies and TV shows are often more accessible to our students.

Again, there are times when reading is the skill we want to focus on, and for that, we need written texts. But when we’re teaching other skills, our students are better able to focus when they’re not also struggling to understand or relate to a complex text. This practice can be especially valuable with our special education and English learner populations.

Teaching with movies and TV shows gives us the opportunity to scaffold, lightening our students’ comprehension load as they master more complex analytical or written tasks.

Many movies and TV shows are high-quality and increasingly seen as worthy of analysis.

Not all movies and TV shows are created equal, but neither are all books. There are really good movies and TV shows out there that tell interesting stories, evoke rich discussions, and break boundaries in innovative ways. Well-respected awards are handed out multiple times a year. Good movies (hello, Barbie) keep people talking for an entire summer.

We’re seeing non-traditional texts like movies and TV shows show up more and more in published curriculum, content standards, and even requirements for AP classes (like AP Seminar, in which students must learn to identify arguments not just in peer-reviewed articles and informational texts, but in literature, visual art, and even performances).

Movies and TV shows are efficient ways to give context.

Instead of long introductory lectures on the historical time period or cultural context of a text, we can show movies and TV shows that help our students see, hear, and experience that context. Instead of struggling to explain irony and humor, we can show them a film clip to help them grasp the tone of a work like Pride and Prejudice or The Importance of Being Earnest.

Not only does showing a movie or TV show save us valuable class time, but our students often “get it” faster from a movie than they do when we require them to take lengthy notes on a PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation.

As a side note, podcasts are a great addition to our curriculum, too. Whether students are gaining background information, analyzing the argument in an informational podcast, or getting wrapped up in a multi-episode story, they’re learning something from engaging with this increasingly popular form of content.

So, we’ve convinced you (or you were already convinced but now feel armed with rationale for teaching with movies and TV shows in your classroom). How do you thoughtfully integrate movies and TV shows into your curriculum so they’re enriching your students’ learning?

7 Ways to Start Teaching with Movies and TV Shows

Let’s go in the order of a traditional unit plan: movies and TV shows can play a significant role in most stages.

Use movies and TV shows to preview a theme or a text.

Given how hard it is to get our students to read, we want to make the most out of their reading when we finally get them to do it. This is why we go ahead and spoil Shakespeare for our students, often showing the film adaptation of his plays (or at least a summary) before they begin reading. Shakespeare’s language is already going to be an obstacle, so let’s give our students a head start.

This is where TV shows can be a benefit: we showed our AP students just the first episode of the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice miniseries. They got a sense of the time period, characters, and tone before they started reading, but they still got to enjoy the fun of watching the plot unfold in the pages of a book.

When we taught Julius Caesar, we had our students look at the text from a crime investigation lens, analyzing the conspirators’ motives to decide whether their assassination of Caesar was noble or traitorous. Before digging into that complex text, however, we introduced the terminology of criminal investigations (and the project they would later complete) with an episode of Psych, a humorous TV detective show.

If you teach thematically, you could also preview your essential question with a film or TV show that generates discussion and interest.

Use movies and TV shows to build prior knowledge.

Sometimes our students need background information to fully understand a text. The immersive nature of movies and TV shows can give our students this understanding quicker and more effectively than a footnote or introductory lecture.

When we taught an excerpt from Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, we realized that the majority of our students in Santa Ana, California, were unlikely to be familiar with mountain climbing terminology and techniques. We showed the IMAX documentary Everest (which happened to be filming on the mountain during the storm Krakauer writes about) to build student interest and help them visualize the setting and events when we actually dug into Krakauer’s account.

While not exactly the same as a movie or TV show, YouTube videos can be your best friend here. When we taught an excerpt from David Epstein’s The Sports Gene, we showed our students clips of the high jump events in the Olympics so cultural awareness wouldn’t get in their way of understanding the text.

Use movies and TV shows to replace lectures.

We’ve been working on some Shakespeare activities, and when we reviewed one of our old PowerPoints, Kate’s first thought was, “Whoa. So much information and talk about boring . . .” Sure, we had done our research and worked hard on it, but goodness, did our students really need to listen to us blab on (and on) about Shakespeare’s background for multiple class periods? 

In our experience, the primary need for lectures in English classes is to provide background information about an author or time period, but there are so many fantastic documentaries out there that can do the same thing in a far more engaging way (and with visuals that help our students to understand better than our text-heavy PowerPoints ever did).

And in an era where it’s so easy to find experts talking about their subjects, we don’t have to pretend to be an expert on everything. Why not let a professor or specialist do the heavy lifting for us?

Use movies and TV shows to teach mini-lessons on skills.

Whenever we teach skill-based units, especially those that focus on a particular literary device, we like to use movies and TV shows before diving into more complex texts. Again, this lets students focus on the skill rather than comprehension, and it tends to be fun and engaging instead of yet another reading day.

We’ve used episodes of Modern Family to teach plot structure, episodes of The Office and Community to introduce comedic devices, and Pixar shorts to teach students how to write theme statements. Because these short films and episodes are, well, short, they allow us to practice the skill multiple times before applying it to written text.

Use movies and TV shows to review the plot after reading, especially if it was a play.

It’s kind of an English teacher tradition to show the movie version of a text after reading it, and while we don’t always have time for it, we’ve found it to be valuable, especially with our struggling readers. Many of us enjoy watching the film adaptation of a book we’ve enjoyed, and it’s okay to let our students do the same. More importantly, it can help clear up points of confusion or fill in the gaps for those who didn’t read the whole thing, allowing more students to experience success on final projects and assessments.

When we teach plays, we’ve found it especially valuable to show the film version because plays are written to be performed, and we lose a lot of the experience when we only read it on the page (especially if it’s a plot without extensive stage directions that help us visualize the setting or tone).

Pro-Tip: Sometimes it’s even more valuable to show the film in parts, especially if you have struggling readers. Not only does this break up the reading, but it gives students a chance to clarify misunderstandings from, say, Act 1 at the end of the act instead of at the end of the play, improving the likelihood that they’ll be able to understand and engage as we continue with the text.

Use movies and TV shows to compare multiple interpretations of the same story.

This is part of the Common Core ELA standards, in both the Reading Literature and Speaking and Listening categories. We’ve been asked to show our students different interpretations of a story or subject in multiple mediums, so let’s not leave out something our students actually enjoy!

Use movies and TV shows as source material for writing assignments.

When we want to focus on writing, we can ease up on the reading load. Asking students to write about a movie or TV show instead of a written text allows us to support our students with a text they understand and enjoy while doing the hard work of learning to write more effectively.

One of our first units every year with standard-level sophomores taught them how to write an analytical paragraph based on The Lego Batman Movie. We started with a review of theme, and then students completed a graphic organizer about Batman’s character development as they watched the movie. After watching, we taught them the 5C analytical paragraph structure we would refer to all year and had them write a meaty paragraph explaining how Batman changes over the course of the movie and what that change suggests about the work’s theme.

Many of our students were actually proud of what they wrote, and it was the same kind of task we would ask our AP English Literature students to do (with a much harder text, of course). But students enjoyed it and wrote strong paragraphs. It was one of our best units and started the year on a strong note.

For many of us, teaching with movies and TV shows is something we’ve had an uncomfortable relationship with: we do it because it serves our purposes and engages our students, but we feel mildly uncomfortable about it because, you know, shouldn’t we be reading or something?

But teaching with movies and TV shows engages our students in a wide variety of analytical, writing, and critical thinking skills, and when used thoughtfully, it’s a powerful tool in our teacher toolkit.

Interested in reading more about this topic? We’ve compiled six of our favorite TV episodes to enrich your curriculum and shared some thoughts about selecting a TV episode that will best suit your needs. Better yet, head over to TPT and check out our LEGO Batman unit plan to engage your students in a character analysis and writing activity that introduces a format they can use throughout the year.