I thought I’d write a quick update on how I have applied Martin Cisneros’ ideas about sketching to learn to a recent lesson.

About a week ago, I asked my Classics of Horror class to create a visual map of the consequences of Victor’s fateful decision to play God. Ultimately, my goals were three-fold. I wanted to (1) assess how well students understood how elements of the plot related to each other, (2) deepen and challenge their thinking about an element of the plot that they might not have thought deeply about, and (3) prepare students for a class discussion on the topic.

I let students decide if they wanted to use a digital sketchpad or paper and pen. Half chose digital, half chose paper and pen. After 10 minutes of mapping, I asked some students to share their maps with the class as a discussion springboard. The digital sketches were inherently easier to share than the paper maps due to the bold, colorful lines. These digital maps were easy to scale up and to project. They were more audience-friendly.

Here are two students’ map:

From my students’ maps and how they talked about them, I learned that students had thought a lot about how Victor’s decision to create the monster affected his family but had not thought about the effect the decision had on Victor himself and his best friend Henry Clerval. In this sense, the maps were effective in allowing me to quickly assess student understanding. When I brought up the omissions I noticed, the class addressed the Victor/Clerval consequences in an ensuing discussion that (hopefully) closed a gap in their thinking.

Students seemed to enjoy mapping though it was hard for the perfectionist-types to be ok with a quick, imperfect sketch. Like any well-crafted “pre-writing” exercise, the drawing helped prepare students for discussion. I believe that mapping helped me achieve all three things that I hoped it would – assessment, engagement with novel, and discussion prep.

At the end of this unit, I will collect some data on students’ perception of this activity and another sketch activity I have planned. For now, I’m left wondering about a few things. Did students really learn more from drawing this map than they would have from writing about consequences? Sketching is fun and something different in English class, but has Cisneros overstated the benefits? How can I better measure the impact of this teaching method on student learning?