Beyond Literary Analysis: Teaching Students to Write with Passion and Authority About Any Text 1st Edition

As if I couldn’t admire and adore these teachers/authors/humans anymore, then they release this gem into the universe. This is by far my favorite PD book thus far. I’ve been dying to make analysis relevant and meaningful to my students while staying within thre bounds of my district and this text delivers past my wildest hopes. It shows teachers how to guide students into reading the world around them and making sense of it. I’d that isn’t the core of our practice, I don’t know what is. It seems like such common sense you are left wondering why we haven’t always operated this way. Why couldn’t I do this own my own? Luckily we don’t have to. Both the leadership and support of Allison and Rebekah will light our way.

My review is as a twenty+ year teacher in the English classroom. Beyond Literary Analysis is an excellent review of how we teach analysis in the classroom. Marchetti and O'Dell delve into making analysis meaningful to students by teaching analysis skills first through topics that our students are passionate about and then extending those skills to literature using fresh approaches to transforming the same, dull, rote essays into something that actually uses students' original thoughts. Practical techniques, often missing in professional books for English teachers, abound. Between this book and 180 Days: Two Teachers' and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents, my last three years of teaching will be more powerful for students and for me.

This book has re-framed my teaching of analysis. It not only validated many of my gut instincts about how to unleash students' best writing, it also gave me practical strategies to this end. As my school year begins, I have already introduced the core components of successful analysis to my students: passion, ideas, structure and authority. My copy of this text is heavily highlighted! #Recommend

Really have to read the whole book to get the essence of what the author is saying. As a coach and busy teacher, I find it much more helpful when I can dig through my book to find those pieces that I need to use. However, this book does have a lot of concise ideas once I get to them.

I actually bought this for my AP Comp class, but it is based more on fictional writing than expository. However, it is such a great find! It has given me renewed ideas for my regs class.

As always, Heinemann delivers with thougt-provoking material.

While reading Writing with Mentors, I saw a glimmer, a faint suggestion that more could be analyzed than just the same texts ad nauseam. When I met Marchetti and O’Dell in 2015, I asked them if they were going to do anything with it. They were. They had begun writing this book.The book is split into three sections. The first provides the rationale for diversifying analysis writing in the classroom. The second section is full of transferable, accessible mini-lessons to help students find their passions, articulate claims, find evidence, select an appropriate structure, and write with authority. Even if you weren’t ready to open up text selection, you could implement from this section tomorrow. There’s even a diagnostic tool for helping you figure out which techniques to use for solving which problems. The last section gives you the specifics for supporting analysis about TV shows and movies, music, sports, video games, and literature. Afterward, there’s a chapter detailing how to design your own support students that want to analyze other “texts,” like fashion or politics.Takeaways:--Analysis constrained to a pre-selected text and formula, explore “lands that have already been discovered.”No wonder students regurgitate safe claims that require little effort (or evidence) to prove. When I communicate nothing but boundaries, there’s no point trying to scale the wall. Even if students resisted the temptation to recite class discussion or read essays on the web, they are aware, even subconsciously, that their thoughts already exist somewhere and therefore, are not their own.--Teaching techniques preserves students’ authorial decision-making.    When I provide a formula, it’s easy for a student to plug in the answers (and easy for me to grade). When I teach the array of techniques available to the writer, they must think. If I short-circuit this process, I am making an inherently thoughtful activity (writing) thoughtless.--Students who don’t get time to write in their own voice have none.While academic voice is part of the hidden curriculum, a student whom only practices writing in it is wearing a coat three sizes too big. By writing about their passions in their vernacular, students disrupt the notion of centralized authority, an idea that has fallen away in most of the United States outside the schools anyway. Lest we think we’re setting them up for failure in the traditional academic system, universities are clamoring for students who can think and communicate, meaning the “traditional” way of doing things at the high school level isn’t getting the job done.How I'll Use It:I want my students to read digitally in class, allowing them to find their own mentors and build their passions, exactly how professional writers engage with their content areas. In terms of analytical writing, I’m going to mine this book hard in the fall with U.S. Lit. As a class that centers around the Great Conversation taking place in American society throughout the centuries, what better way for students to meet that idea than by conversing with a text that is talking back to our society?Should You Buy It?I’m so glad I’ll be able to quickly reference both the middle and end sections. Usually, I just find a couple of cool lesson ideas in a book, but this one is loaded in the middle, and I can see using the lessons with the whole class as well as small groups and individuals. The end gives some detailed support that I will need. Marchetti and O’Dell did so much hard work reading and developing expertise in all those text areas--I’d be crazy not to take their help.

i didnt reallg use it

Product was in better shape than I expected. Super happy.