Are You Teaching Theme Effectively?
“The theme of Disney Pixar’s Up is that adventure is out there. For example, Russell says, ‘Adventure is out there.’ This means that adventure is out there. It is important because it reminds Carl that adventure is out there. In conclusion, adventure is out there.”
We’d like to tell you the paragraph above is hyperbole, an exaggeration of terrible student work for comic effect. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much a direct quote, and not an outlier. Clearly, our theme unit needed yet another overhaul.
Teaching theme has always been one of our toughest classroom challenges, and yet, just like teaching writing, it’s not a challenge we could avoid. We made revisions year after year, moving farther and farther away from the stories recommended in our textbook to teach theme, stories that were definitely not working with our students.
It doesn’t help that “theme” might be one of the most misused words on the planet, or at least a word used in so many different contexts that confusion is inevitable. And our students are far more comfortable with a Homecoming theme than they are with any sort of theme in English class.
Even in the world of education, there’s no clear consensus. Teaching theme in AP Seminar looks nothing like teaching theme in AP Lit (where it’s not even called “theme” but “the meaning of the work as a whole”). We’ve found plenty of materials created by English teachers we respect that treat single words as themes, even though single-word themes are a cardinal sin in our classrooms.
But teaching theme effectively is crucial, especially in middle and high school English classes, and when our students master the skill, their reading and writing abilities increase significantly.
Why Teaching Theme Is Essential
For the sake of a common definition, we consider theme to be “the central idea or insight about human life the author wants us to obtain from reading a piece of writing. It is the story’s deeper meaning, and it takes the form of a statement about a topic.”
Courage allows people to attempt difficult tasks in their lives even when the possibility of failure is high.
Love, if taken to extremes, can be negative rather than positive.
These are the kinds of statements we’re talking about when we say, “theme.” Theme is what gives literature its power, telling stories about a set of characters that, somehow, reveal something about ourselves and help us understand the world we live in more deeply.
On a more practical level, theme is at the heart of any writing our students do about literature. It’s the “so what” about a piece of literature, the ultimate end product of any literary devices or stylistic techniques an author uses. Theme is part of our content standards, and in AP English Literature, it’s a crucial part of the AP exam—students write one of their three free-response questions about a novel or play’s “meaning of the work as a whole.”
Why Theme Is Hard for All of Us
Despite the fact that it is central to much of what we do in English classes, theme—whether we’re talking definition, discussion, or analysis—is not easy. Crafting a good theme statement is hard work. Not only does it require you to fully understand a text, but it requires revision and careful wordsmithing to convey the complexity of a novel rather than oversimplifying and reducing a piece of literature to a cliche or a moral.
Writing effective theme statements is hard for students of all levels, and it’s hard for us as teachers, too. Even when we’re creating theme statements, we go back and forth between the two of us, trying to find the exact right words to convey what we’re trying to say. And we’re the experienced ones!
Over time, however, we’ve developed a set of principles that help us (and our students) craft more effective theme statements, whether they’re in AP Lit or muddling through standard-level sophomore English.
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Six Principles for Effective Theme Statements
#1 A theme is a complete sentence, not just a topic.
We teach our students that a theme is an interpretation of a piece of literature, an insight about life, the claim they argue for when they write about that text. Single words like “love” and “courage” are topics—yes, the text is about that (and no one’s likely to suggest otherwise), but what is the author saying about that topic?
As teachers, this is one of the most helpful principles we can reinforce with our students. We’ll always stand our ground, insisting that a single word cannot be a theme, but you don’t have to agree with us to see that a statement about a topic will make for a stronger thesis statement (and thus a stronger argument) than a topic itself: a student who claims that Macbeth makes clear that unchecked power ultimately leads to destruction is going to make a stronger, more sophisticated, and more complex argument than a student who claims that Macbeth is about power.
#2 A theme is not a cliché.
Reducing a complex piece of literature to an overused saying like “love conquers all” or “appearances can be deceiving” immediately weakens any argument about that piece of literature. The texts we teach matter to us because they offer new insights about life or put into words what we’ve always known to be true. And the hard-earned insights that matter to us are messy, too complicated to sum up in a trite phrase.
When students are stuck on a cliché, we’ve found it helpful to ask them follow-up questions. Why is love stronger than other emotions? What tends to happen when we are deceived by appearances? Why are we so easily fooled by first impressions? Questions like these can help students move away from clichés and toward more meaningful theme statements. For some students, it’s as simple as asking them to come up with fresh language that expresses the same idea as the cliché.
#3 A theme is not a plot summary.
Themes must be universal, statements that could apply to many people rather than statements that only apply to the characters in a specific story. Stories are powerful because we can see ourselves in them, and for a work to have significant meaning, it must go beyond one character’s experience.
Because themes are our interpretations of a text, the claim we argue for when we write about that text, we also must make a statement that someone could disagree with. If our students have summarized the plot correctly, no one is going to disagree with it, making it a weak thesis statement.
When our students struggle to move beyond plot summary, we like to ask them what the text seems to be showing us is true about life in general. Is it noticing something about how life tends to work or people tend to behave? What can we take away from it, even if we are not that character in those specific circumstances?
#4 A theme does not use absolute terms like never, always, every, etc.
If we consider a theme statement to be our claim about a piece of work, then using absolute terms immediately weakens our argument. There are (almost) always exceptions to a rule, and when we make a claim that uses absolute terms, our reader may immediately begin to think of counterexamples (particularly if it’s not how they interpreted the text). Stories are also about one group of characters in one particular setting: it’s unlikely that one story can represent all people in all situations.
When our students use an absolute term, we encourage them to replace it with a term like “often,” “more likely to,” “can,” or “may.” That simple edit is one of the easiest ways to strengthen our students’ themes.
#5 A theme addresses the entire story, not just one part of it.
Sometimes our students have a great insight about part of a text. But they are often tempted to ignore parts of the text that oppose or contradict that insight. A theme must encompass an entire text, which means sometimes our students have to let go of their initial idea or consider the implications of other events in the novel.
This, by the way, is probably one of the principles that most prepares our students for questions about theme on standardized exams: when they look for the answer choice that applies to the largest percentage of the passage, they’re more likely to select the correct one.
Often, asking our students to add the word “when” or “but” to their theme statement can help them to make revisions that address other parts of the work.
Note: This is one principle that frequently tripped our students up, particularly those who wanted to be able to follow a specific formula that would reliably lead to an “A” on the assignment. Just because a theme addresses the entire story does not mean the theme is reflected in every part of the story. Most often an author develops a theme over the course of the entire work, picking up (or dropping off, as the case may be) elements that will lead to the fulfillment of the theme statement by the work’s conclusion. Talking about those elements that build toward the fulfillment of the theme statement is just as important as talking about the fulfillment itself. For some students, this required explicitly teaching the idea that each body paragraph could support one part of a theme statement, as long as, by the end of the essay, each part of the theme statement had been supported.
#6 A theme is not a moral, which means it doesn’t tell us what to do.
This may be the hardest principle for our students to internalize. When we start teaching theme, this is the most frequent reason we send themes like “Don’t judge a book by its cover” (moral and cliché), “never give up,” or “be yourself” back for revision.
This stems, in part, from the fact that we often define “theme” as the lesson a text teaches us. But texts that tell us what to do or how to behave don’t move us (and frequently annoy us). We don’t know many people who cite Aesop’s Fables as their favorite piece of literature, after all. Reducing themes to morals is yet another way of oversimplifying a complex work of literature, and it’s hard to make a compelling or complex argument when we do this. We often tell our students if they can imagine someone wagging their finger at them as they read the statement, it’s probably a moral.
One of our best tricks in this situation is to ask our students to rephrase their idea as an observation. Why shouldn’t we do X? What happens when we do Y? When do people tend to behave this way? Students who write morals are usually on the right track, and with a few pointed questions, their themes improve significantly.
So, how do we teach our students these six principles, and, even more importantly, how do we get them to apply these principles to their own theme statements? The key is practice—lots of practice. And this is definitely a skill students need scaffolded: they need to start simple and move toward greater complexity over the course of a unit (or even a school year).
7 Strategies for Effectively Teaching Theme
Start with small, non-threatening texts like nursery rhymes, film clips, or Pixar shorts.
We’re always advocates of using movies and television shows to introduce skills, and teaching theme is no exception. When our focus is on learning how to write effective theme statements, that’s the most challenging thing we’re asking our students to do, so we need to scale back the text complexity. The obstacle is the construction of the theme statement, not the understanding of the work.
We’ve tried this in a number of ways, and we’ve ultimately settled on Pixar shorts as the best way to introduce theme to our students. For a few years, we used nursery rhymes, but we quickly realized that because nursery rhymes are so short and often written for children, it’s really hard to get our students to move beyond writing morals. We also tried a popular activity in our district using film clips, but because themes encompass an entire story, it wasn’t always easy to come up with a theme without context, and the film clips were from children’s movies that, again, lent themselves more to morals than meaningful insights about life.
Pixar shorts are short (obviously), but they still tell a full story. Because the ideas are conveyed visually rather than through words, students find it less intimidating to explain their thoughts about the work, and they’re often already familiar with the short films, which means they’re eager to rewatch and discuss.
Have students identify theme statements before writing their own.
Confession time, here. This one took us a little too long to learn. It wasn’t until we got frustrated that once again, students weren’t listening to our instruction that we realized we should probably check for understanding during our instruction rather than expecting students to just . . . absorb the principles in one go. As we taught each principle, we gave students a series of statements (about Disney movies we were confident they’d be familiar with) and asked them to select the one that was a true theme.
This check for understanding helped reinforce the principles, and it also allowed our students to see more examples of the principles in action.
It’s worth going back to this step when you transition from visual media to written texts: even in an AP class, we might give our students a theme statement and ask them to find evidence to support it before asking them to write a theme statement themselves.
Ask students just to write theme statements, and give them a chance to revise.
While your summative assessment for a unit on theme will likely require students to write a paragraph or an essay in support of a theme statement, let your students start small. Let them start by simply writing a theme statement before giving them feedback and an opportunity to revise.
Sometimes we had students share their themes aloud and provided edits and clarifications on the fly (this is also a great opportunity to show students that writing themes is hard and even you struggle to find the right words sometimes!). Sometimes we walked around and checked themes as students worked, offering feedback and minor edits. Sometimes we had students submit a theme statement and provided written feedback.
The key, though, is that students have the opportunity to revise their themes, putting the principles into action for themselves. We know from our own experience that we have to do something to truly learn it, and writing theme statements is no exception.
When you transition to texts, seek out texts with simple, straightforward themes.
When you transition to having students write themes about texts, you’re increasing the challenge, so it’s helpful to transition in stages. We usually had students identify the theme of a short story before identifying the theme of a novel, and we looked for simple texts like the parable of the Good Samaritan that had pretty obvious themes.
You’ll likely have to reinforce the principles again (especially that pesky principle about morals), but in the long run, this will help students more than jumping straight to a complex novel.
Encourage students to consider the beginning, middle, and end.
We started encouraging our students to organize their literary analysis essays chronologically, in part because they were writing essays (and themes) that only addressed part of a text, or, as we noted above, trying to support the entire theme statement with every part of the story. Asking students to consider the beginning, middle, and end of a text as they wrote their theme statements ensured that their themes covered the entire text, gave them an organizational structure for their written argument about that theme, and, ultimately, tended to lead to more complex themes.
Look for texts in which a character changes in a clear and significant way.
When a character experiences a significant change over the course of a text, it’s often an enormous neon arrow pointing to the text’s theme. If the character had to learn something, it’s likely we are supposed to realize something from watching them undergo that process. Watching a character change also sets students up nicely to both include the entire story in their theme and form an argument that covers the entire story (before change, incident that motivated change, after change).
After our disastrous attempt to have our sophomores write analytical paragraphs about the theme of Up, we realized that we needed to simplify even further. We decided to start introducing theme with The LEGO Batman Movie. Batman is clearly a different person at the end of the movie than he is at the beginning, and students could wrap their heads around why he changed and what that shows audiences about life in general. We used a similar strategy when we read Elie Wiesel’s Night later in the semester, and this repeated practice with more complex texts made it easier for our students to come up with meaningful insights about Wiesel’s memoir.
Give your students the opportunity to work in groups.
We know, from our own efforts to create materials for students, that talking things out tends to lead to a stronger end product. And when we’re able to structure our students’ collaborative efforts so that they stay on task and engage in genuine discussion, group discussions can be especially effective in helping them write strong theme statements.
While we’d had students work in pairs to write theme statements in the past, we experienced our greatest success when we developed a structured process for having students work together to write paragraphs supporting a theme statement throughout the fall semester with a variety of short stories, and by the time we got to Macbeth at the beginning of second semester, our students had fantastic discussions about exactly the best way to articulate the play’s themes.
This repeated group practice translated to many of our students’ individual work as well. The process of having to work out the exact wording of a theme statement strengthened their skills more than our think-pair-shares had done in the past.
Theme is at the absolute center of any analytical discussion about a piece of literature, and so it’s essential that our students learn to write effective theme statements. Ultimately, teaching theme becomes a significant part of our efforts to teach writing, and when we give our students simple principles to follow and repeated practice applying them, their themes and their writing both improve significantly.
Teaching theme is challenging, but we’ve spent many years perfecting our approach. Save yourself hours of trial and error by purchasing our Teaching Theme with Film bundle. You’ll get our Pixar shorts mini-unit, which includes materials for direct instruction, multiple opportunities to practice writing theme statements about Pixar shorts, and a visually appealing infographic students can use as a resource throughout the year. You’ll also get our The LEGO Batman Movie unit, which includes guided viewing materials, a structured writing assignment in which students argue for a theme based on the way Batman changes over the course of the movie, and even a quiz if you want to hold students accountable for the film (and, perhaps, give them a little boost in their test grade category). These were two of our most successful activities with students, and we think you’ll find them effective and engaging in your classroom as well!