Thinking Beyond the 5-Paragraph Essay
Essays can be a good evaluation tool in high school, but if you get stuck in a read-this-and-write-an-essay rut with your high school homeschooler, try one of these strategies with your high school homeschooler.
One challenge homeschoolers run into is how to evaluate your student’s learning — how can you help your student master the art of synthesizing information and expressing her own ideas about it? An essay is the classic approach — and it’s certainly a useful one — but essays can get boring if they’re your go-to for every single class. Here are some alternative evaluation projects to try.
Graphic Novel Adaptation
Transform the information into a graphic novel made of comic strip-style segments. This is ideal when you want to check understanding — do you understand what happened and the order it happened in? — so it can be handy for history or science evaluations. I also like using this method with poetry since thinking about how to illustrate a poem in a series of panels pushes you to think about it in a more nuanced way. This strategy works best when you’re dealing with a narrow, focused topic — trying to illustrate, say, Robinson Crusoe, would be a bigger project than you usually want.
Timeline
Another good option for corralling lots of factual information is the timeline, which can get more sophisticated as students move into higher learning. History timelines are common, but you can also use a timeline to track a novel where the timeline is significant (over years, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, or hours, like Mrs. Dalloway) or to explain a scientific process or concept.
Walking Tour
I love this idea for books where geography matters, like The Odyssey or Ulysses. This project encourages you to think about the significance of place in a very specific way, so it works best if you really push students to work to explain the significance of each place in their walk- ing tour. Instead of thinking about what happens in each place, think about why it matters and what the specifics of that place bring to the theme.
Metaphor Map
These are one of my favorite ways to explore complex ideas, like the categorical imperative, or complex texts, like modern poetry. Student have to really drill down to unify complicated information into one clear metaphor — essentially, coming up with their own creative explanation of a complicated text. The final illustrated metaphor, done well, is often more academically sophisticated than any essay could be.
Annotated Reading Notes
If your goal is to explore a wide range of texts, making comparisons and connections as you go, an annotated reading journal can accomplish that with more nuance and specificity than an essay. The key to doing this successfully is to model a set of annotations for students — if you’ve never done annotations, having a base to work from can be helpful. This is handy in classes like science and history where you’re covering lots of information you want to remember, but you don’t love the idea of giving lots of tests.
Podcast Series
Almost all the skills you need to write a great research essay — researching a topic, developing a thesis, and creating a structured argument around your thesis — come up when you’re creating a podcast. Aim for multiple episodes; ideally, you’ll ask for at least three so that students have a chance to do a proper introduction to the topic and a clear conclusion, but you can pick any number that seems appropriate.
Oral Defense
This one can be stressful for students the first time, but you may be surprised by how enthusiastic they become with a little experience. Basically, you treat your evaluation like a classic dissertation defense: Students prepare to face a panel of advisers (you can include friends, siblings, or just go it solo), and in a directed conversation explain their understanding of a topic, making connections and thinking on their feet to answer the questions posed them.
