Teach POV (Point of View) Like a Pro: 10 Strategies & 7 Short Stories

Who tells your story?

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s poignant lyrics at the end of Hamilton ask the key question for those of us who teach POV (English-teacher-speak for “point of view”).

On the most literal level, when we teach POV, we’re asking our students to identify who, exactly, is telling the story before us. After all, it matters: different characters have access to different bits of information and differing opinions about the events of the story, all affecting how complete a picture we get.

The Common Core standards related to point of view for Grades K–7 are all about this level: students are learning how to identify different points of view and that different characters (including themselves) have different points of view on a topic or event.

More significantly, however, we teach POV because a text’s point of view determines the story that is told. And sure, for entertainment’s sake, this can have interesting ramifications and be fun to explore. But as we move away from entertainment and toward questions of truth and history, it is essential that our students know there is more than one story and the “loudest” story isn’t always the most true story.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, “The danger of a single story,” has become a staple in many English and history classes precisely for the way in which Adichie articulates this point and argues for the necessity of representing the world in all its variation and diversity. No culture or experience can be summed up by a single story, and when people or cultures interact, there are at least two sides to the events that transpire between them.

Part of preparing our students to be critical thinkers in a world of information overload and all manner of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news is to teach POV not just because it’s a literary term they “should know” but because it’s crucial to questioning the narratives that flood our news feeds on a daily basis.

We’re focusing here, though, on how to teach POV from a literary perspective, exploring the terminology we use to discuss the concept as it applies to fiction. But it’s important that we help our students see the connection between point of view in literature and perspective in nonfiction: they’re essentially the same thing and have similar effects. And the more our students understand that what we teach has ramifications beyond the four walls of our English classroom, the better prepared they are to engage with the world in meaningful ways.

Key Literary Terms to Cover When You Teach POV

Point of View

The perspective from which a story is told.

Narrator

The character who tells a story.

• Students need to understand that the narrator is never the author. Even when we have an omniscient narrator, the narrator is still a fictional persona created by the author to achieve a specific purpose.

First Person Point of View

The narrator is a character in the story, using pronouns like “I,” “me,” and “we.”

• It’s helpful for students to recognize that this perspective draws us into the story and connects us to the narrator; however, we’re also stuck with the narrator’s limited knowledge and potential biases (particularly frustrating if we don’t like the narrator).

Second Person Point of View

The story is told from the reader’s perspective, using pronouns like “you.”

• From Somebody’s Luggage by Charles Dickens: “You were conveyed,—ere yet your dawning powers were otherwise developed than to harbour vacancy in your inside,—you were conveyed, by surreptitious means, into a pantry adjoining the Admiral Nelson, Civic and General  Dining-Rooms, there to receive by stealth that healthful sustenance which is the pride and boast of the British female constitution.”
• After years of hearing about first and third person, students are often curious about what this is. While it’s most common in technical writing (or choose-your-own adventure stories), it can be used to powerful effect in fiction. 
• By placing the reader in the story, the author draws us in, but this perspective is also off-putting: no one likes assumptions what they do or think (and this is probably why it’s relatively rare in fiction). Off-putting effects, however, can provoke discomfort that leads to reflection.

Third Person Limited Point of View

The narrator is not a character in the story, using pronouns like “he,” “she,” “it,” and “they” to tell the story; the perspective is limited to one character’s thoughts and feelings.

• In effect, this is similar to first person point of view but with less immersion in the story and connection to the narrator.

Objective Point of View

Method of narration in which the narrator reveals only what can be seen and heard; there is no interpretation, commentary, or inclusion of characters’ private thoughts and feelings; the purest form of objective point of view would be dialogue.

• This is pretty rare because it’s super challenging to write: even adverbs and adjectives move us away from pure objectivity. It forces the reader to make all the interpretations, which can be both frustrating and powerful.
• From “Hills like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway: “The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.”

Stream of Consciousness

A method of narration in which the narrator presents a character’s thoughts in a seemingly random order, mirroring the way in which people think when associations may be psychological rather than logical and memories may be mingled with current thoughts and experiences.

• From Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolff: “She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.”

It’s also helpful for students to be familiar with the following three terms, even though you might introduce or focus on them in a separate unit:

Dramatic Irony

When the audience knows something that a character does not know.

• Third person omniscient point of view can give us access to information that not all characters know. We may also understand events differently than a first person narrator, and this mismatch can lead to richer characterization.

Verbal Irony

Occurs when a character says the opposite of what he or she means; the reader is intended to understand that this is not how the character feels (it is not a lie intended to deceive).

• Students may struggle to recognize the subtle perspectives that are portrayed when a narrator uses verbal irony. After all, a student who takes the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice—”It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”—at face value is in for a much different reading experience than a student who recognizes that this belief will be the subject of mockery throughout the novel.

Suspense

The quality of a story that makes a reader want to continue reading to find out what happens next.

• The information we do (and do not) have access to can create the suspense that makes us want to keep reading to find out what happens next.

10 Strategies to Help You Teach POV Effectively

We had students practice with excerpts we pulled from children’s and young adult literature. Here’s an example of each:

First Person Point of View

It’s helpful for students to notice that even though “he” and “his” appear in the narrative, it doesn’t matter: we’ve got “my” and “me,” so it’s first person.

Third Person Limited Point of View

Students may struggle initially with the fact that many characters are mentioned in this paragraph, but everything the crowd, Krum, Fleur, and Bagman do can be seen and/or heard by Harry. There is nothing presented that he can’t see or hear, and we have multiple phrases that remind us he is inferring what happens to Cedric based on what he can hear.

Third Person Omniscient Point of View

Students might need a reminder that the two uses of “I” are in dialogue, not the narration. The last phrase makes it clear that the narrator knows something Mr. Clutter does not, making this an example of third person omniscient point of view.

In theory, this is a great way to help students see how the story changes when it’s written from a different point of view, and it also requires them to show understanding of characterization. There are always a few creative students who do a really nice job with this.

Unfortunately, many students rush through this to get it done, reducing its impact (and making it feel like busy work), so we didn’t always make time for it in our short story unit. It became more of a fun activity that we wove into larger units (like having students write a letter as the Friar or the Nurse to accompany our Romeo and Juliet close reading activities).

For our below-grade-level sophomores, we never really moved too far past identifying point of view and noting the impact of changing it: that was about as much as they needed. However, we tended to pair our short story unit with our creative writing fictional narrative assignment, so we made sure that a thoughtful choice about point of view was one of the decisions students made in the prewriting for their narrative.

Our go-to novel review activity for our AP Literature students required them, as one of the assignment’s components, to identify the point of view and provide a quotation supporting their selection. When we modified the assignment for our sophomores, we kept this part in as well.

It’s a quick and simple way to remind students that point of view is one of the “essentials” they should consider any time they read a story.

Our last four suggestions are probably more appropriate for PreAP, honors, and AP Literature students, but if you have strong students in your standard-level classes, these are great strategies to push them beyond the basics when it comes to point of view.

Once students have mastered the basics of point of view, it’s fun to discuss texts with more complicated uses of point of view, like the first person plural (The Bluest Eye, “Exotics”), second person (see below for ideas), first person where the narrator is much older than they were in the events of the story (“How I Met My Husband”), or objective point of view (see below).

You might also consider texts with unusual narrators (like Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror”) or an unlikable narrator. Even that 11th grade staple The Great Gatsby works here since the titular character is not the character telling the story.

These non-traditional uses of point of view tend to have a stronger impact on the text’s meaning, allowing for students to clearly see how the manipulation of point of view directly affects a story.

This might be a hot take, but sometimes when authors try to play with point of view, they go too far, losing the impact they were initially aiming for (at least for some readers). We would argue this is the case with AP Lit classic Frankenstein: the monster really masters the English language by watching a family through a window?!? 

Jeffrey Eugenides frequently plays with point of view: The Virgin Suicides is told in first person plural (really? You all felt exactly the same way?); Middlesex includes a scene where the first-person narrator describes an event they couldn’t possibly have experienced. It’s interesting to consider what Eugenides is trying to do and whether he succeeds in doing so.

Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt, is another great choice here: the narrator for parts of the story is an octopus. We recommended it as a contemporary option for AP Literature because it’s an enjoyable story and allows for this interesting discussion of point of view; we’ve also seen increasing numbers of teachers using it in their AP Literature classrooms.

If we go back to the importance of point of view in understanding the truth of a culture or a historical event, it’s important that our students see this in practice, reading texts that address the same (or similar) topics from different points of view. For example, reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart paints a much fuller, more complex, and more accurate picture of colonialism than either text does alone.

Sometimes students overlook the literary devices they’ve known since elementary school, assuming they are too simple to write about in a literary analysis essay. But point of view can have powerful effects that students can capably discuss, particularly in the timed setting of the AP exam.

It is, however, helpful to practice this with students so they remember how to discuss point of view effectively. In this context, it probably doesn’t matter as much that a certain point of view draws us into the story or makes us connect to a character, but it’s certainly going to affect who we sympathize with and how we describe the characters in the text.

The 2005 AP Literature prompt (Q2) about “The Birthday Party” works particularly well for this (note that the excerpt is not included because of copyright issues, but it can be found with a quick Google). The narrator is describing a scene she witnesses in a restaurant, which adds interesting nuances, particularly when there are a couple sentences written in second person point of view.

6 Short Stories to Teach POV in AP Literature

Over the years, these six stories haven been our go-to texts for exploring point of view in our short story unit, all of which lead to engaging classroom discussions.

“Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s short story retells the same story six different times, changing up some of the details but ultimately coming to the same ending, no matter what happens. Atwood’s critique of commercial fiction makes for compelling conversation, and its use of the second person point of view is particularly effective.

Do note that the content is quite mature, and there is one instance of the f-word that we altered in the version of the text we gave to students. There’s a lot to discuss here, but you’ll need to be mindful of your students and your community.

Other key literary terms: characterization; plot structure (especially resolution)

“Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway

Our textbook provided Hemingway’s short story as an example of objective point of view: there is one adverb in the narration that technically makes it omniscient, but it’s probably one of the closest examples out there. Most of the story is restricted to what can be seen and heard, as if a camera was observing the conversation between a young couple.

The couple is sitting at a train stop, about to make an important decision; what makes the story compelling is that the narrator never identifies what that decision is. We must infer it from the clues provided in the text, making for an excellent exercise in close reading. The decision the couple must make is whether or not to have an abortion, however, so be mindful of your students and community.

Other key literary terms: symbolism

“Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather

Cather tells the story of a troubled young man named Paul, first from his teachers’ perspective and then from his own, offering us a fuller and more complex understanding of Paul and his motivations. Longing to escape from his monotonous working-class life, Paul steals money and runs away for a glamorous few days in New York City. But when he realizes he’s about to be caught, he commits suicide rather than return to his previous life.

Cather’s story went over well with our students and offered rich discussions; however, we became increasingly aware of suicide attempts within our school community and moved away from teaching this one, so again, be mindful of your students and your community.

Other key literary terms: characterization; symbolism

“A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner

Faulkner’s story about the stubborn Miss Emily Grierson, clinging to a Southern culture that is rapidly disappearing in the face of modernization, is a challenge for students with a nice, creepy twist at the end. But what makes it useful for discussing point of view is the use of the first person plural narrator: the townspeople are narrating the story, adding a gossipy tone that affects our understanding of the events.

Other key literary terms: plot; characterization; setting

“Somebody’s Luggage” by Charles Dickens

We discovered an excerpt from Dickens’ much less commonly known novel in Barbara Bloy’s English Literature: Close Reading and Analytic Writing workbook, which we highly recommend. The excerpt is the first half of the fourth paragraph where a young boy describes his upbringing in a family of waiters, and it’s told effectively in the second person point of view.

We loved using this excerpt, not only for its unique point of view, but because it gave our students a taste of Dickens (both his language and his themes) without having to drag them through one of his full novels. It also avoided many of the content concerns in the other stories we’ve mentioned here, so it was a consistent staple in our short story unit.

Other key literary terms: characterization; irony; satire

“Teenage Wasteland” by Anne Tyler

We found Tyler’s short story one year when looking for an example of third person limited point of view that our students would enjoy (and one in which the choice of point of view impacted our understanding of the story). Told from the perspective of Daisy, the mother of a teenage boy, we watch her helplessness as her son Donny gets into more and more trouble despite her attempts to help him. 

Being locked in Daisy’s perspective reinforces the sense of helplessness she feels as a parent, unable to know what her son is truly thinking and how best to help him. (We also appreciated the opportunity to play The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” as a supplement.)

Other key literary terms: characterization

Stories we haven’t taught ourselves but have discovered more recently that would work well for teaching characterization include “Cherry Coke and Mint Pulao,” “Exotics,” “A Family Supper,” and “The Rock Eaters.”

Short Story Recommendations to Teach POV in Standard-Level Classes

In our standard-level classes, we combined point of view with a larger unit on plot and characterization, so our recommendations from our post on teaching characterization were the primary texts we used to teach POV: Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “Catch the Moon,” W.D. Wetherell’s “The Bass, The River, and Sheila Mant,” Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Saki’s “The Storyteller,” and Tim O’Brien’s “Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?”

But one other short story we found effective and relatively engaging for our students was “And of Clay Are We Created,” by Isabel Allende.

The short story retells the true story of a thirteen-year-old girl trapped in the mud after a volcano erupted in Columbia in 1985. Allende’s story describes the efforts of a journalist to save Azucena, the girl trapped in mud, but is narrated by the journalist’s romantic partner, who watches the events on television from another country. The use of third person point of view conveys the narrator’s sense of helplessness while also providing us insight into the journalist based on her knowledge of him.

Analyzing point of view is a skill that runs through every year of the Common Core standards, and it’s easy to see why: it matters so much not just to our comprehension of a story but to our understanding of the world around us. It’s essential that we teach POV as part of our curriculum, helping our students to get better and better at discussing its impact and noticing the nuances as they move beyond the “Big 3” (first, third person limited, and third person omniscient).

Whether you use it to teach POV or as your go-to resource for any unit in your class, make sure you check out our literary terms list, which comes with access to review Kahoots. These were the “need-to-know” terms we found most helpful for our AP students over the years, and we’ve included student-friendly examples.

Are there other resources you wish you could find? Let us know at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.