| By Sarah Slubowski, Teacher Mentor
“On the surface, what my character wants is to solve the mystery, but under the surface, he wants to feel proud and be helpful to others.”
“My character really wants sandwiches – that’s what’s visible- but underneath, he doesn’t want to be taken advantage of all the time just because he’s strong.”
“The obvious want is to survive, and underneath my character wants to be loved”
In Jill’s classroom, students thoughtfully shared the comments above, with quiet enthusiasm and candor, about characters they were developing for a writing project. Jill is encouraging students to push their thinking to look beyond what is obvious about a character to see what’s below the surface. To support this deeper dive into character analysis, she references an iceberg map on the wall, filled with examples students developed when they were already tackling this advanced work as they analyzed characters from books they were reading; now students are applying these same skills to their writing.
“My character wants Boba Tea and underneath, they want friends and people who love them.”
“Clearly my character doesn’t want to get turned into a potato, but the thing you can’t see is that what he also really wants is for Fred to be happy (Fred’s the character who is turning everyone into potatoes).”
“Mine is a shy 15 year old who looks like he just wants to solve the murder mystery… he also wants to solve his own curiosity and to protect people.”
“My character does not want to be a victim, and he wants to not be looked down on.”
“The obvious want is for her sister to be nicer, and the under the surface want is that she wants to be with her parents, but she hides that…. “
When I checked in with Jill about how she was pulling such gems from her students, she shared the following from her recent newsletter:
We are well into our study of the genre of fiction. Right now, work in reading and writing compliment each other; students are becoming deeply acquainted with the story mountain as a model of the arc of fiction. For the purposes of this unit, the story mountain has been divided into four sections, each with a purpose: introducing characters, a setting and a problem, building tension, describing a climax, and resolving it all. Students are working on showing instead of telling by striving to create vivid mental pictures with words.
As I tell students all the time, I think of writing as the most difficult subject in school. There are so many discrete skills kids need to juggle! In addition to all of the skills and concepts above, writing makes huge demands on everyone’s attention, executive functioning, and emotional regulation. To help support this, we use a variety of strategies in the classroom. We use a number of warm-up routines, refer to graphic models and organizers, and write for short bursts, which are punctuated by conferences and check-ins. Everyone is doing a great job!
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