Evaluate the Strategy for Use in Your Own Classroom

Discuss with your colleagues the challenges and benefits of using this session's strategy with your students or reflect on them in your journal.

1. Incorporating a novel the size of The Grapes of Wrath into a history unit may be difficult because of time needed to read and work with the novel. An alternative would be for the history teacher to time the Great Depression unit to coincide with the English teacher's unit on The Grapes of Wrath. What are the organizational issues and/or instructional challenges that would be raised by "dual teaching" the novel this way?
2. How can you excite students and encourage them to read a long and challenging book like The Grapes of Wrath without resorting immediately to the film version of the story? And if the film is used (in addition to the book), are there additional benefits? Are there instructional drawbacks (in the history classroom) to using the film without the novel?
3. Are there some key selections from The Grapes of Wrath that can be brought to students without having them read the entire novel? What are some of those selections and what history topics do they address?