This facilitator/learner model works exceptionally well in preparing young people for post-school life. And the best way to see this process in action is through the use of film.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you want students to know about the Watergate Scandal and its implications in the post Nixon years. First you prepare the students for the viewing of the film “All The President’s Men” with a half hour reading assignment that is interrupted by thinking-style response questions. This introduces kids to events that riveted the nation about the time their parents were born and which young generations may know about through such comedic thrusts as naming a character in The Simpson’s, “Milhouse,” Richard Nixon’s middle name. Actually, most viewers don’t relate the kid with the weird name to the former president, but nonetheless, you get my point.

Next, with no lecture or other means of introduction, you have the students watch the film. You address a few discussion questions and get the kids going on “what-if” and “could have been.” Then you allow students to select one of several research projects which will require a Booleen search, an internet sourcing tool that is excellent for the students to understand, and let the kids teach themselves what they need to know about this important piece of American history.

The pre-film read prepares the kids for the topic; the film, a highly regarded document in itself, does its job beautifully; the students exercise important research skills; information is gained directly from the source instead of from the grown-up in front of the room who owns the info and distributes it as a lecture. Facilitator and Learner at work!

Even without a pre-film reading assignment, film is an excellent tool for young people to become self-taught.

TeachWithMovies is currently reshaping many of its film guides to assist teacher in teaching according to the new paradigm. Check it out.

Clearly the topic was the problem, but sometimes students will need to read nonfiction whether it’s boring or not. Actually, now more than ever, students need to be able to read what the 2010 Common Core State Standards (CCSS) refer to as “Informational texts.” What they’re talking about is the kind of complex, challenging nonfiction that is important for success in college, job training, or in pursuit of careers.

Alas, it is the job of teachers across the curriculum to help get students ready for the fact that most of the reading they will do in post-secondary education is informational. Looks like change is afoot in the kinds of reading assignments ELA, social studies and other classes require.

Check out the following chart which shows the percentages of fictional and nonfictional reading required by the CCSS:

The above percentages suggest that ELA classes will be assigning a lot more non-fiction: more exposition, argumentation and personal essays, as well as speeches, opinion pieces, memoirs, historical, scientific, and economic texts. In elementary school teachers can expect to assign more biographies and autobiographies, books about history, science and the arts. Nonfiction reading skills will require students to be able to comprehend graphs, charts, directions, forms and maps.

If teachers don’t play this right, there will be a lot of low scores on those scan-tron tests used to evaluate reading skills and determine whether students will get diplomas.

So what we need is a hook—something that will interest the students and get them to actually read nonfiction. This is where film comes in. The right documentary or narrative nonfiction film can be used to entice young readers to explore more depth on the topics or characters they see in the film. This means reading. Consider how a cooking show, quite popular with students, can provoke the viewer to read ingredients on food product labels, search out new recipes on the internet, or read magazine articles about a cook who appears on the show. There has been a considerable increase in the number of cookbooks and biographies of great chefs, of food histories and political tracts on the food industry as well as reams of information on vegetarian and vegan diets. One must read in order to truly understand obesity and its impact on society as a whole or to know what fast food chains have done to aggravate the fat attack on the American public.

What may help move students to read more, other than interest sparked through well-done documentaries, is a process of pairing film with the books from which they were adapted. This has been commonly done with works of fiction such as Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Milos Forman’s film by the same title. Most films, as a matter of fact, are adapted from books and short stories. But to pair a work of nonfiction with the film adapted from the book is not so common. Of course, no film can contain all of the information found in the book on which it is based, but if the film is good enough, it can provoke viewers to read for themselves the story they enjoyed on screen. John Krakauer’s nonfiction account of the adventure and eventual death of a young college graduate in Into the Wild was made into a fine film, directed by Sean Penn and bearing the same title. The autobiography of Li Cunxin, titled Mao’s Last Dancer was made into a movie in 2009. The dance scenes and the account of the young ballet star’s defection to the U.S. are engrossing. The TWM Learning Guide to Mao’s Last Dancer uses the parables that Li Cuxin was told as a boy to provokes viewers to look up and read more about the life of this famous Chinese dancer.

Teachwithmovies is working on connections between nonfiction in film and the storehouse of “informational text” leading to or from these films. Stay tuned for more to come. A guide to 127 Hours is coming soon. Click Here for TWM’s Lesson Plans from Movies Based on Nonfiction.

The early classics of American Literature are increasingly obscure to today’s students. Most of them would prefer a mediocre film over a book any day. But Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” as dense and difficult as it is, redounds with ideas that are as important now as when they were written in 1835. And Jagger’s “Sympathy for the Devil” makes the central idea outright obvious. Plus, it leads to a good writing assignment.

The story is best read aloud so the kids do not get boggled by arcane language and the complex sentence structure that college English majors love.

On the third page of the story, or thereabouts, depending upon the edition you read, a dialogue ensues between Goodman Brown and “the figure of a man” that the young protagonist meets walking in the forest at night. Brown claims to be a part of the race of honest men and good Christians and swears that if he were to continue along the path with this shady traveler, he would be the first of his line to visit the Dark Side. The traveler thinks this is a hoot: “Ha! Ha! Ha!” he says, “. . . prithee, don’t kill me with laughing.” The traveler who sports “grave and decent attire” but uses a twisted walking stick which bears “the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent,” proceeds to tell Goodman Brown about the malicious deeds done by people of good reputation, some related to Brown himself.

Sometimes I interrupt the story here and play a video of The Rolling Stones performing “Sympathy for the Devil.” Other times I begin with the video and let the class search, as in a puzzle, for a connection between the iconic bit of rock and roll they have just seen and the idea Hawthorne, a devoted recusant, communicates.
I like to distribute a printout of the lyrics of the song and ask the kids what they know of history that makes sense of the words. Through sharing information, they all can see connections between the violent deeds mentioned in the story and those in the lyrics.

Then comes the assignment. Jagger’s lyrics constitute a monologue spoken by the devil, slick as he is. Hawthorne’s words constitute a dialogue between a naive young man and, apparently, the devil. I give the students a choice: write a monologue, coming from a character you create, referring to events from our times that show hypocrisy; or, write a dialogue that reveals events from our times and the hypocrisy behind the actions. They struggle at first and then usually write remarkably interesting pieces. The discussion that follows recitation by some students of the product of their labors makes us see that all of are sometimes, to some degree, culpable in the progress of evil. “After all,” as Jagger says, “it was you and me.”

We’ve put this and more into a Snippet Lesson Plan Comparing Hawthorne’s "Young Goodman Brown" with The Rolling Stones’ "Sympathy for the Devil".

Once you see how well rock and roll works to teach an idea (or at least to open minds to learning an idea) you can check out TWM’s Snippet Lesson Plan on Determining Theme — Using a Film Clip from "Pink Floyd: The Wall".
To keep our work in perspective, every teacher needs to watch "We don’t Need No Education" at least once a year.

A wonderful teaching moment should never be ignored, despite all the brouhaha about standards and lesson plans and rigid adherence to curriculum. So, of course, I brought up the film Babies, which only two of the students had seen despite its popular appeal.

Two days later, we were watching this touching and delightful look at the lives of four babies from different cultures.

The students loved it. The film generated good class discussions as well as inspired writing on cultural differences, personal reflections and opinions. . . . I must have gotten three or four good writing assignments out of the class; the best kind — writing that comes from solid interest in subject matter and the desire to think about and express what is on the mind, knowing you cannot be wrong in the opinions you communicate.

Teachers should view the film themselves and then possibly introduce the beauty of non-fiction to a class of any status, from remedial to honors, just to see the wonderful response.

This three-word sentence tells us nothing about Ted since we don’t know what is meant by “mean.”

“Ted likes to stomp kittens to death with his size 14D steel-toe army boots.”

Now this tells us that Ted is mean; more than mean, Ted is a psycho.

Herein we see the use of description in its ability to show, rather than tell. And, indeed, what we want from our students is to be shown rather told whatever they are trying to communicate in their narrative writing.

A good way to teach this concept is with a snippet from Thelma and Louise that shows characterization in the opening segment.

First, a brief digression:

The film opens with a dark and colorless view of distant hills approached by a long dirt road. Slowly the scene brightens, becoming a strikingly beautiful stretch of nature. This change from darkness to light shows rather than tells viewers what will happen in the movie. Someone in the film is going to change from darkness to light, or, more accurately, from ignorance to awareness. And what’s more, the scene shows a fine example of infinite regress; the dirt road leads away from the center of focus to vanishing point. Then the darkness returns, eventually becoming a black terrain with only a vague shadow of clouds visible above the hills. Great metaphorical image for the lives of both Thelma and Louise: great way to show rather than tell the film’s whole story.

Exit digression:

Film’s advantage over the written word lies in its ability to visually portray characters. Both Thelma and Louise are defined in the visual details as they ready themselves for their road trip. Visuals alone let us know Thelma is restrained but yearns to let it all go and be free. This can be seen in how she goes to the refrigerator, takes out a candy bar, eats a bite and returns it to its cold quarters. A few minutes later she does this again. Then finally she takes the candy bar and eats it all. Great way to show what will become of a woman tired of limited passion in a repressed life. Look at how she prepares for the trip. Unable to decide what to pack, she empties a drawer and dumps the contents into her suitcase.

Louise, au contraire, is neat and precise; she packs her things in plastic bags stacked in an uncluttered suitcase. She straightens her collar, calls Jimmy, turns his picture down when he doesn’t answer and leaves a spotless kitchen by washing a glass and leaving it upside down on a towel.

Keep watching this segment until the moment the two women pose for the iconic photograph Louise takes with her Polaroid as they set off on their journey. You will see several more examples of quick shots that reveal character.

What’s fun is to follow up this snippet with an assignment in which the students characterize a friend, someone from mass media, or even a teacher, in a description of a revelatory action. Or, you can give them the characteristic you want them to show, say sneaky, angry, guilty, nervous, hungry, disappointed, or adventurous, and let them write a scene which uses an imagined person to portray the assigned characteristic.

The kids will get it; they’ll know the difference between showing and telling in their narrations. (If they choose to watch more of Thelma and Louise on their own time, that’s on them and that’s good.) See TWM’s newest Snippet Lesson Plan on Characterization Using a Snippet from Thelma and Louise.

How can math or grammar be expected to compete for attention with all of that? A few clicks from Spark’s Notes can land a kid on a porn site. Poor kid can’t even focus on not reading the novel anymore; too distracted. It’s a vague reminder of the old days when you would look up a word in the dictionary and then peruse the page on which you found the word in awe of unknown gems you could add to your vocabulary.

The kids did leave something behind, though, on their journey forward and that is the ability to be a student in the old tradition of sitting in a classroom, listening to lectures, taking notes, writing essays, and passing scan-tron tests. It will take several generations before the school systems in this country renounce these old ways of learning and come up with an innovative, techno-propitious approach to education. Thus, we the education professionals are left behind to teach young people archaic student-styles so they quit failing and give the professionals time to figure out what to do.

Years ago, a film students still enjoy, became a huge hit because it captured precisely the behaviors of high school kids. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off made clear the disrespect for the system itself through a story about a character who manipulates everyone around him, friends included, for his own personal ends. The administrator chasing down the elusive Ferris, is a fool; the school secretary is nutty, but wise. The two teachers in the film, one of whom does a hilarious roll call, are immune to the students seated before them and the kids themselves are completely disengaged. All those left-behind kids can identify perfectly with this film. [Editor’s Note: TWM recommends Ferris Bueller’s Day Off only as a reward movie with an introduction and discussion about the cult of personality. See the TWM essay on Reward Films.]

What is to be done? How do we get kids to be on time to class, sit up straight, find a desk in the T formation at the head of the classroom, nod appropriately when the teachers spout their wisdom, raise their hands, do their homework, yada yada yada?
We give them acting lessons, of course!

Every kid can act the part of an honor student. Tell them there is a casting director watching, hunting to hire bright young people for a classroom scene of kids headed to Harvard. Tell them the part pays big bucks and then watch their posture change. Tell them this casting director will be in tomorrow and will remain all period so they better come to class on time and prepared. Were they to act the part of an honors student for a month’s time, they would actually become honors students.

But how do we get them to actually play this role, without giving them points or promising some sort of grade boost visible on their next report cards?

We show them the fishing scene from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The lunatics in the asylum are kidnapped by McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson in his esteemed performance) who absconds with a fishing boat and teaches the various crazies how to fish. When McMurphy introduces the inmates to the port authority as doctors from the asylum on a preplanned outing, all the men change to fit the image. When they return from their ocean experience, they look and feel like, as McMurphy says, not lunatics, but fishermen. Students can see in the snippet from Cuckoo’s Nest how the pretense of sanity can make you sane, or at least, seem to be sane. Just so, through pretense, a kid enrolled in school can become a student, or at least seem to be a student, by playing the part. [Editor’s Note: See TWM’s new Snippet Lesson Plan using a film clip of the fishing excursion scene from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest to assist in teaching students how to derive them.]

I’ve actually done this exercise in classes many times; it works in that it gives kids the option, the choice, to pretend and possibly become better at the old school definition of a student. They may not pull it off entirely, but a few may see that, should they want whatever it is that a formal education may bring them, playing the role of a good student will help them get it.

Will showing students that they can act as if they were in honors classes help to keep students interested long enough for the education professionals to catch up with the digital age? Ferris Bueller played the role very well; “nine times,” says Mr. Rooney, the administrator, in reference to Bueller’s class cuts, yet Bueller was still college bound. Honors kids can survive just about anything.

So here is my response:

Motif and theme are serious concepts to be taught as part of ELA guidelines. Man on Fire makes motif so clear that students will not have to look up the word again when they read a poem or short story or novel. And the theme to which the motifs in this film snippet point, is worthy of long discussion and deep personal reflection.

Here’s how:

Before I show the snippet, I tell the kids to keep a lookout for any references to religion. More than one reference, I tell them, constitutes a tricky use of repetition to tell them something.

Early in the snippet, Creasy, played by Denzel Washington, asks his friend if he thinks God will forgive them for what they have done. The friend says no. The audience soon learns that these men have been military operatives involved in violence, including assassination. Later we see Creasy reading a bible. The mother of the girl, Pita, played by Dakota Fanning, who Creasy has been hired to protect, sees him with the bible and asks him if he reads it. He says, “sometimes.”

She then asks him if it helps and he again responds, “sometimes.” The nun who corrects Creasy for having Pita arrive late to school asks him if he ever sees the hand of God in what he does. He says, not for a long time. When she begins to recite a line from the bible, Creasy finishes the proverb and then says to her that he is the sheep that got away. It is a poignant moment. Later Pita gives him a medallion to wear. She tells Creasy it is Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Then, finally, at the snippet’s end, we see Creasy alone in his room and watch him as he reaches for his bottle of whiskey, hesitates and turns his hand to pick up the bible. This moment is a turning point for him. He has stopped drinking and has learned to live again.

These many references to the bible constitute a clear use of motif, which is defined as a repeated element that points in the direction of a theme. All that bible talk and all those images lead the viewer to see Creasy as redeemed. Maybe God will forgive him for what he has done. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether or not God forgives him; he clearly forgives himself.

Now the fun begins. The discussion ensues.

Some kids will argue that Creasy was redeemed, earned his personal forgiveness, through love of the child, not through religion. Others will counter that love is a biblical concept. Some will assert that through spiritual growth all losses are restored. Some will argue that through giving of oneself, guilt will begin to diminish. Others counter that guilt is a religious concept to start with. On and on it goes. These discussions will be made with passion and commitment because students are talking about the literature that engages them and grabs their emotions.

The students are talking about ideas and how ideas are presented in film, which with a little manipulation translates easily into text-based literature. There will be no right or wrong answers, but there will be many weak or strong answers.

How lucky to be a teacher with the ability to show film.

How lucky to be a student with a chance to learn important lessons using the media of his or her own generation.

The frail child on the table had been born with a congenital heart defect that deprived her of oxygen. The operation rearranged the blood vessels leading to the heart and lungs to correct the problem. Thomas was Dr. Blalock’s lab technician. Together they had developed the operation and Thomas had performed it over a hundred times on dogs in the laboratory. Dr. Blalock had tried the operation only a few times on dogs. Now, the operation was being performed for the first time on a human being, a desperately ill patient who would die very soon if her heart condition wasn’t corrected. Dr. Blalock wisely insisted that Thomas look over his shoulder and guide him through the operation.

These two movies, one a documentary, the other historical fiction, tell the story of young black man who dreamed of going to college but was denied the chance when the bank that held his savings failed during the Great Depression. He found a job cleaning dog cages for Dr. Blalock who was then as a professor at the Vanderbilt University medical school. Dr. Blalock was a very prejudiced man in many ways, but he knew talent when he saw it. He allowed Vivien Thomas increasing responsibility in his laboratory as the young man’s talents became evident. Although the doctor and Thomas worked side by side for decades, Thomas was never given the salary, the respect, or the credit that he justly deserved until after Dr. Blalock died. Only then was Thomas recognized as one of the most talented professors of surgery in the nation.

2) Unchained Memories: In the 1930s, the last generation of Americans who had lived under slavery was getting close to the eighty-year-old mark. Writers from the Federal Writers’ Project fanned out across the South to record the memories of former slaves. The producers of this film wove some of the most interesting stores into a wonderful series of vignettes. In this film, actors provide dramatic readings of these recollections. A narrator, describing the history of slavery in the United States, pieces the episodes together. Unchained Memories provides first hand accounts of the human costs of slavery and the lives of slaves in the American South. ELA teachers can also use this film to supplement lessons on narrative and memoir.

3) The Tuskegee Airmen: The Tuskegee Airmen tells the story of the African-American 99th Fighter Squadron in World War II. This film shows another step on the road to full equality for African-Americans in the U.S. military. This long march began during the American Revolution when blacks fought for independence. During the Civil War, black foot soldiers gained the respect of the nation and demonstrated that they could fight under the conditions of modern warfare. The Tuskegee Airmen proved that African-Americans could excel at the controls of complex fighter-bombers. General Benjamin O. Davis and other black officers during and after the Second World War demonstrated that they could successfully lead large military units. In 1948, President Truman ordered the complete integration of the armed forces. The experience of The Tuskegee Airmen was one of the reasons that the President could convince the American people and the officers in the military, that this was the right decision. The Tuskegee Airmen is a great introduction to the role of black soldiers in the military, an important subject for American history.

4) Glory: At the beginning of the Civil War, most white Americans believed that blacks could not be disciplined to make good foot soldiers in a modern war. The belief was that they would run when fired upon. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a white abolitionist, and hundreds of black volunteers in his regiment, gave their lives to prove that black men could fight as well as whites. Glory accurately details the story of Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Regiment, which was the first black army regiment commissioned during the Civil War. The 54th served with distinction and by the end of the Civil War black soldiers were a substantial part of the Union Army.

There are other movies that will make fabulous additions to any secondary level classroom studying Black History Month. A Force More Powerful offers wonderful archival footage of students being taught non-violent civil disobedience before they embarked on the Nashville sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement. Remember the Titans shows a freshly integrated football team in 1970s Virginia. While there are fictional elements to this film, its stories about black-white relations are true and actually happened. A Raisin in the Sun teaches students about a plethora of topics, including: the Great Migration, Pan-Africanism, the on-going problem of housing discrimination in the United States, families under stress, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and the poetry of Langston Hughes. People like the family in A Raisin in the Sun, with the determination to claim their part of the American Dream, were the driving force behind the Civil Rights Movement.

Black History Month is an important educational opportunity, and these films will offer students a glimpse into stories they haven’t heard before, sparking discussion and generating ideas that can be harnessed into thought-provoking essays and homework assignments.

Begin by asking what might have occurred in the mind of an individual that led to the invention of a chair? What thought drove him or her to pound together a few chunks of wood so that someone may sit?

The kids drift through various suggestions: desire for comfort, avoidance of dirt or bugs, an effort to keep dry in wet weather. Usually, to spark deeper thought, I create a vision of the after school rush to a parking lot when we hear the cry “shotgun” ring out from every kid who doesn’t drive. We talk about the status in a family that allows one member to sit on the best chair in front of the television or the pecking order that determines who sits where at a dining table. When appropriate, I even mention the difference between the chair occupied by a judge who presides over a trial and the chair in which the defendant sits. (I may even point out the contrast between the cushy chair behind my desk at the back of the classroom and their hard and chilly desk seats.)

Eventually someone gets it: power. The chair is a status symbol; it shows the power of the individual who sits. A king on his throne, an executive in a corner office, etc.

Next ask the kids what is meant by the words exchanged in any casual greeting that they no doubt have heard a dozen times before they got to school today. Role play, if you will:

“Hello,” you say.
“Hi,” some kid will respond.
“How are you?” you add to the dialogue.
“Fine, and you?” the kid will likely respond.
“Fine.”

Then, ask the student to do the role playing experience again. This time, have the kid begin the exchange:

“Hello,” the kid will say. (You may notice that some kids point their chins a bit and say “sup” instead of “hello.” Oh well, the lesson still works.)

But instead of responding with a return hello, (or “sup”) you simply stare at the kid. Maybe he or she will repeat the greeting; you remain silent. Guaranteed, discomfort will ensue. If you stare long enough, the kids will accuse you of mad-dogging.

You might want to do another dialogue and when the kid asks, “How are you?” you respond with a lengthy discourse on the condition of your hangnail or the problem you are having with tendonitis on your six mile jogs.

Very soon the kids realize that the standard greeting is really a culturally conditioned manner of insuring the safety of each individual in a world wherein the true danger to humans is other humans. The actual meaning of the dialogue is thus:

“I see you there before me.”
“I see you as well.”
“I am no danger to you.”
“Nor am I a danger to you.”

You will find dozens of examples that show how what lies beneath simple objects, like a chair, and beneath simple words exchanged in common greeting, is a very serious thought.

Now you can show the film you have in mind and require the kids to look beneath the images they see and the dialogue they hear.

Accountability is in the mind of every teacher at all times.

So I ran a test on myself in terms of my alleged accountability. Here’s what I discovered:

Over the years, I have tried to get the kids to open their minds to the ideas of Joseph Campbell, the myths that inform our thoughts and actually underlie even physical reality. I want them to know that idea, thoughts, are everything; they lie at the heart, not only of literature, science and history, but daily reality and I can best do this with a 20 minute snippet of a film they already know and love. That’s big. I will hold myself accountable for that.

The snippet I show comes from a fine film, too violent to use in its entirety, but perfect to hold the kids attention: Man on Fire. In this film Denzel Washington plays a disillusioned, guilt ridden man who regains self respect and a sense of peace through a relationship with a child, played by Dakota Fanning. The first 20 minutes of this film clearly illustrates what may be called the Child Savior Myth, best defined as the idea that children offer adults a return to the innocence that is the source of beauty and love in life. Or something like that.

After I recently showed the snippet to a scrappy group of students who have had a history of failing their English classes, I had reason to see that, in terms of accountability, that my lesson was a huge success. I felt accountable for the fact that Lupe sauntered into the classroom and bragged about how she pointed out the Child Savior in a television show her parents were watching. Edward asked, during class, if politicians kiss babies to show they have been saved. Lindsay said she explained the whole thing to her mother as together they unwrapped the ornaments used to display a Christmas scene, the center of which is the baby Jesus.

The lesson I wanted my students to learn, that a myth is an idea that shapes perception of reality, was hammered into the minds of these students in a snippet of a film far more dramatically than through a short story or a novel. Since they love movie-time and are inclined to pay attention, I can teach the entire lesson in one class period and I don’t have to spend time struggling against hidden cell phones and iPods. Then when I do assign reading, I can ask them to ignore type size and how many pages they will (grudgingly) read; I tell them to simply look for how a child’s innocence will save the day.

Once in a while, I assign the more interested students to follow up this lesson with an extra credit assignment: See the film Harold and Maude and write an essay in which you illustrate the reversal of the child savior myth. Maude, the old woman, restores through her childlike innocence, Harold who, although still a child, has become embittered, cynical and sad. Very good film.

I admit, this is not exactly Joseph Campbell, but it’s a good start. And in terms of accountability, I’m hot. Take that, L.A. Times.

The snippet lesson for the film Man on Fire is available. Click here.