Preparing Students to Understand Character

Putting Theory Into Practice


Here it is!! Finally an applicable, usable blog full of lesson ideas you can put right into use. What follows are Wilhelm and Smith's ideas for lessons designed to help students get the big picture of characterization. These lessons are designed to help students to focus on internal character since they tend to often focus on external traits. Enjoy.

1) Using personality tests – a literacy practice many students have already developed

This activity helps students focus on the type of information we want to know about ourselves and others, because that's just what we want to know about characters in novels. Teenage students have seen many of these from the silly to the serious, from Your Inner Fashonista to Myers-Briggs.

This online test helps students determine which Percy Jackson character they are most like.



www.quizrocket.com/percy-jackson-quiz

Students can fill out tests on themselves and move toward filling out the tests from the perspective of characters in their novel. Completing tests also provides the opportunity for students to think about what characteristics matter the most to our understanding of people. Students could even rank traits in order of importance. This is in line with one of our goals in teaching characterization: that students realize that some characteristics matter more than others.

2) A second goal in our lessons was to ensure that students are able to transfer what they learn to novel situations. One way to do that is to present them with targeted practice using texts designed to focus on the skills you are trying to teach. This is called simulated instruction. One kind of text that provides the targeted practice is ads and portraits, both for print and TV. Many ads call for viewers to make inferences about the products based on characters who sell them.



www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1jfofjPtEY&NR=1"

Show the ad, have students make a list of three to five important traits of each character. Tally the class lists. Next, have students explain how they came to their decisions. Where their inferences derived from group membership or individual relationship?

3) Personals – drawing on students' understanding of nonacademic texts to help develop strategies they can apply to reading literature.

Smith and Wilhelm use examples such as using student profiles to select the summer camp or dorm roommates that students would most prefer.

Important tips to keep in mind when using ranking activities:

- students do ranking independently before assigned to small groups to work out group ranking
- watch groups for disagreements because they foster elaborated explanations
- help students to make comments like, “I disagree. I see ...”
- items being ranked need to be problematic – causing discussion
- tally class responses somewhere the entire class can see
- begin discussion with the item with the widest array of responses
- make sure to ask students why they thought what they thought
- after discussion debrief, highlight the strategies students used to come to their judgments and the criteria they applied to make them.

Students may come to see that characterizations are made based on a character's actions, language, thoughts, body language, physical description, and how the character relates to other characters.


4) Media – more practice with media texts – using movie trailers, easily found on the internet – can be a fun way for students to practice getting impressions of characters and figuring out what they based their impressions on.

After practicing with each of these venues students should be ready to take on the duplicit Long John Silver, George the curious monkey, or the evil White Witch.