Teaching Effective Literary Analysis Essays

Just a few days ago I was blogging about how I literally Googled, “How do you teach effective literary analysis essays?”

And although middle school ELA teachers across the nation are expected to teach 12, 13, and 14 year olds how to analyze a piece of literature in the form of an essay, there was basically nothing out there for middle school literary analysis.

If you remember, I told you how I broke down each area of a literary analysis essay into lessons, chunks, chart papers, and examples just so I could get my own brain wrapped around things, but not surprisingly it was exactly what my students needed too.

I literally learned how to write an essay in front of them by typing my rough drafts in real time.

My mini-lessons were based on challenges I was having and again, not surprisingly the same challenges they were having.

You might also remember that I said I was going to tell you what happened.

So here it is.

My students’ ELA proficiency scores increased almost 40% in just that one year. 

By year two, there was an almost 65% increase in my seventh and eighth graders’ ELA proficiency scores.

This upper elementary teacher, turned accidental middle school ELA teacher, who was previously Googling how to teach English teacher things, and who would have sworn up and down that teaching writing was her weakness, had basically completely turned around her middle school ELA classroom.

If you had a chance to look at the Free Literary Analysis Reference Booklet, you’ll see that I really looked at literary analysis and broke it down into manageable chunks for middle school ELA teachers and students.

When I was first fumbling through teaching this essay, I basically just used that college-level essay I found from Googling and broke it down as best I could for middle school.

My teaching methods were obviously pretty effective, but I always felt a bit scattered organization-wise for the unit.

I was truly kind of creating my lesson plans on sticky notes or notepads each day and this cycle continued each year.

Administration and other teachers started asking, “But HOW did you do it?”

I saw that I really needed to break it down in a way that I could use my lesson plans year after year, as well as show other teachers how I was teaching literary analysis effectively.

Six years later, I FINALLY finished my Middle School Literary Analysis Writing Unit.

The Free Literary Analysis Reference Booklet I keep talking about is a result of that unit.

I spent months creating the most comprehensive, thorough, and thoughtfully broken-down unit I have ever created:

The Literary Analysis Unit has each and every element your students need to know for writing literary analysis responses and essays.

Just >> CLICK HERE << to check out the full Literary Analysis Writing Unit, and I’ll be back with part three of the literary analysis blog series to give you some helpful tips for teaching literary analysis in your middle school ELA classroom.