I love The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I’ve loved it since 10th grade when I read it in Mrs. Throckmorton’s English class. It is a masterwork of suspense and, frankly, it gives me the heeby-est of jeebies. I always taught it in October because it’s a good, scary read, it’s thematic, and because I love it. When I last taught English and I filled out my plan book, I wrote “Hill House” across the whole month of October. I have discussion questions about plot, symbolism, historical context, and theme. When my peers asked me what I was teaching, I answered “Hill House.” Simple, right?
Not so much. My love of the story blinded me to the reality that Hill House, wonderful as it is, is only a means to an end. While I would love to believe that my students are equally enamored of the work, in reality, they often don’t get it. The final exams usually reflected a surface-level understanding of the plot (at best) and some superficial awareness of the themes that I told them existed in the book. The summative assessment reflected my own lack of clarity around what the content was that I was teaching through the medium of the Haunting of Hill House.
However, when I asked myself a few simple questions, I found the clarity I lacked and moved toward better instruction and assessment. These questions, often referred to as Quinn’s Six, were created by Juli Pugh Quinn (Kelly, 2004) retired professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Cal State, LA. She wrote them as a tool to help her own sister in planning meaningful instruction in the early 1990’s. They are now used by thousands of educators nationwide through the network of the School Reform Initiative through the Center for Leadership & Educational Equity
Quinn’s Six Questions
1. What am I teaching?
2. Why am I teaching it?
3. How am I teaching it?
4. Why am I teaching it that way?
5. How do I know my kids are getting it?
6. How do the kids know they are getting it?
When I look at these six questions in alignment with the Critical Skills approach to instruction, I must change the answer to question #1 from “The Haunting of Hill House” to “Literary Devices and Elements of Plot.” This immediately points me towards the formative and summative assessments that I’ll be working with (since I already have assessments that I use to measure understanding of these ideas in other contexts) as well as the methods that I’ll need to use to scaffold instruction which will, in turn, drive my day-to-day planning.
The answer to #2 must change from “Because I love it- it’s a great book- and plus it’s Halloween!” to “These are the state-approved Grade Span Expectations for 10th grade English” and “My peers expect 11th graders to know these two things.”
#3 is just plain embarrassing. How am I teaching it? “We read aloud in class because I don’t believe anyone will read it for homework (ouch!), I ask questions which, after a long pause, I answer.” This is obviously not an answer I can let stand. How will I teach it? I’ll begin with a seminar on what scares us, exploring the concept of fear from a lot of different perspectives. I’ll use a challenge in which I ask kids to write and/or tell scary stories (urban legends or campfire ghost stories, maybe?) that we’ll dissect for plot elements and maybe for literary devices. I’ll do more with kinesthetic methods like plot mapping and character sketch carousels. I’ll create challenges that ask them to evaluate characters in relation to one another and to decide whether the book is really as scary as I think it is.
I’m teaching it that way (#4) because it’s a better way to get my kids engaged in the story. I still believe that, if I can get them hooked, they’ll like it. My job is to get them hooked on the story.
The last two questions, “How do I know my kids are getting it?” And “How do the kids know they are getting it?” are where the assessments live.
I’ll know my kids are getting it when they can identify allusion, alliteration, simile, metaphor, and onomatopoeia in the context of the story and explain why they make the story more effective- or why they don’t.
The kids will know they’re getting it by tracking the results of their formative assessments that ask them to identify examples of different literary devices from that day’s reading and/or discussion. They’ll chart which devices they’ve identified correctly, how many times, they’ve identified them correctly, and which ones are still confusing.
I’ll also use End of Day sheets asking students to reflect upon their process and understanding each day. The accumulated EOD sheets will give the kids evidence and examples for a final reflection paper on the process of reading the book and their understanding of the elements of plot and the literary devices that we’ve studied. Even with this superficial examination of the Q6, my plan seems much clearer. I have a solid sense of where I’m going with this unit and I also have some techniques in place to help me measure whether my kids understand- before we get to the summative assessment!
In looking at our own practice, we must begin by asking ourselves where we want to end up. Where do we want our students to be at the end of the lesson, the day, the week, or the year? What do we need them to know, do, and be like if they are to succeed both in and out of school? Answering these questions can be time-consuming, but the wise educator realizes that this time is well spent. It provides a roadmap for planning, helping us to sort the essential learnings (both content and process) from the flashy, fun, kid-friendly lessons that can become the focus. This is not to imply that good teaching is neither flashy nor fun nor kid-friendly- in many cases, it is all three. We must clarify, however, that the techniques we use to teach our lessons (the projects, activities, units, and challenges) are the means to learning the content and skills rather than an end unto themselves.
Assessment can be either the bane of the classroom teacher’s existence or a powerful tool for planning and instruction. We make choices every day that determine how we will approach assessment and whether it will be a help or a hindrance in our practice. If we remain mindful of the power of quality assessment, we will discover a powerful resource at our disposal.
Curious about our approach to assessment? Check out Assessment in the Critical Skills Classroom– now available on Kindle or hardcopy.