Articulating rich, nuanced themes / main ideas is almost always the goal line in English class, right? What does this text MEAN?
But it's challenging for Ss.
A big reason for this is that we often wait until the end of the text to start honing in on themes. (1/)
But it's challenging for Ss.
A big reason for this is that we often wait until the end of the text to start honing in on themes. (1/)
I've been experimenting in a current unit with encouraging students to use strategies to articulate "hypothesis themes" early on + throughout their reading. (2/)
This way, readers aren't overwhelmed with trying to find THE theme in a whole novel. They are collecting possible, potential themes as they read. This feels more doable. (3/)
Then, when we finished the novel, we gathered all those possibilities together and vetted them using these questions: 
Here's the micro progression:
In the end, I feel like this helped. There was a lot less staring into space and semi-randomly pulling something out of the air because Ss had been thinking about it + collecting ideas all along. Then, they weighed those ideas, sorted them, curated them.
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