The Impact of Short Stories and Poetry
By:  Tessa Potgeter

Project at a Glance :

Students taking World Literature will be reading the text, The Door of No Return and several articles, short stories, and videos. This will allow students to understand who they are and take their experiences and explore and present how those experiences can positively impact their future. The culminating project is one the student develops to answer and presents to the teacher. This unit is roughly 4-6 weeks because students will be working on this 1-2 days a week.  

Driving Question:

How can my experiences positively impact my future?        
Standards:
  • W 4: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
  •  SL 4:  Present information, findings, and supporting evidence.​​
  • SL 1:nitiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grades 11-12 topics, texts, and issues.
Team / Culture Building:
  • Using the Values Cards activity students will examine poetry and short stories to develop an appreciation and understanding of the question, “How do short stories and poems connect us?”
Entry Event:
  • Based on the genre of poems and shorts stories chose, students will move among stations and write down specific poems and short stories with the genre(s) they like the best.  There will be candy at station to represent that genre.
Stakeholders:
  • Students
  • Teachers
  • Administrators
Empathy Building:
  • Students will think about what they might want to write about if they were a poet or author of a short story writing to connect people together.  Look at their poems and short stories they have picked out. Establish what qualities they have that connect us together. These are not specific examples. They are just qualities. Quality means a distinctive attribute or characteristic possessed by someone or something. You can even look at the characters and write down their specific qualities, such as:  Love, Fears, or
    Danger.​​​
Inquiry / Need to Knows:
  • Students will write a 100-150 word proposal as to why they want to use the specific genre to answer the question "How do short stories and poems connect us? 
  • Using the qualities chosen while building empathy students will create a Mood Board showing those qualities.
Incubation:
  • Explore the poems and short stories. What lessons, themes, ideas, perspectives, adversities, and fears do the mentor texts have? Then, Use the ideas that you came up with when exploring the poems and short stories you will try and come up with as many ideas as possible to answers the driving question: “How do poems and short stories connect us?” using the Idea Quota protocol.​
  • Other ideas to consider during this stage include:  Quick Writes, Think, Pair, Share, Mood Board, and 3 - 12 -3.
​Checking in:
  • Entrance tickets
  • Top 10 list
  • #Mood
  • Pluses and Deltas 
Solution Building:
  • Dot Voting to narrow down ideas.​​
  • Followed by the Where is the Love protocol
Critique and Revision:
  • Students will conference with the teacher for feedback.
Authentic Audience:
  • Classmates
Final Presentation:
  • Students will present their solutions using Flipgrid to small groups of peers.
Click here for teacher's full plan.

​Reflection and Feedback:

Click here for the teacher's Journey through PBL on Padlet . . .

Meet the Educator:
​
Tessa Potgeter teaches 12th grade World Literature at Zeeland East High School in Zeeland, MI.

     “PBL helps me to continually challenge myself while also connecting curriculum and the read world for my students.”
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