Academic Goals
- To use story structure to format a narrative to support informational writing
- To build fluency
- To cite evidence and sources in the text
- To plan and develop with a peer
Teacher Big Ideas
- Allow students time to think before writing.
- Go slow to go fast by scaffolding up from the pre-writing activity.
- Many formats can be used for constructing narrative writing, and one is not necessarily better than the other.
Prepare for the Activity
Prepare a template for a comic strip or allow students to prepare their own. Label the template with the parts of the Hero's Journey and prompts for students.
- Call to Action: Identify the problem.
- Threshold: What is the background of the problem?
- Helper: Who or what is trying to change the course of the problem?
- Abyss: What challenge is the helper facing in his or her quest?
- Transformation: How is the helper trying to change the outcome?
- Return: What might it be like if the helper is successful?
Tip: Use an identical six-frame chart for students to paste their resource links into for later reference if you have specific sites you want them to use.
Instructions
- (optional) Consider showing students What Makes a Hero?, a TED-Ed video by Matthew Winkler to help students understand the flow of the Hero's Journey.
- Provide the template and optional resources to the students.
- Students create their storyboard using text and images. Note: Images are optional, especially if students are taking too long to find them! They are intended to help students visualize their narrative but are not required. Another Note: The Noun Project is a great place to find black-and-white clip art.
- Students write their narrative using the images they found to illustrate key points as a guide.
- Be sure to have students cite sources as they write.
- Don't overdo the prompts.
- The Hero's Journey is a guideline, not a mandate.
- Eliminate unnecessary segments, depending on the topic.
- Keep the storyboard build time very short--it is not the main writing project!
- Simplify and shorten the activity to a beginning, middle, and end. For example, What's the problem? Who solves the problem? How do they solve the problem?
- Preformat images for students to create "libraries" on the side of your slide.
- As student find success, pull back scaffolding.
Hero's Journey Social Studies Edition
The Hero's Journey Protocol is really a concept-sorting activity. A concept sort is a strategy that helps students label, classify, and organize the parts of an historical event into a framework for better understanding. Teachers provide students with a list of people, places, and events from the event. Then, students palace them into different categories and explain their decisions.
Academic Goals
- Improve comparison skills between historical events.
- Boost narrative writing and fluency in historical contexts.
- Elaborate on contextualization.
- Comprehensive timelines of an historical event lend themselves especially well to the successful completion of a Hero's Journey Protocol.
- Use simplified readings instead of college-level texts. Instead of using excerpts from the Communist Manifesto or the Long Telegram, try SparkNotes.
- Provide students with lists of participants in the historical event, as well as phrases in the event that they might easily associate with steps in the Hero's Journey, i.e. preparing for the invasion, launching the invasion, advancing, retreating, etc.
- Using a shortened, six-step version of the Hero's Journey may be appropriate when scaffolding for elementary of middle school students, but don't be afraid to give high school students the longer twelve-step framework. It offers twice as many potential connections for your future storytellers.
Six-Point Model | Twelve-Point Model |
Act I Call to Action Threshold | Act I Ordinary World Call to Adventure Refusal Meeting with the Mentor Crossing the Threshold |
Act II Helper Abyss | Act II Tests, Allies, Enemies Approach to the Inmost Cave Ordeal Reward |
Act III Transformation Return | Act III Road Back Resurrection Return with Elixir |
- Show students a short YouTube video overview of the Hero's Journey, "What Makes a Hero?" by Matthew Winkler. After watching, practice identifying the stages of the Hero's Journey using commercials of short nonverbal videos from the collection at the Literacy Shed (literacyshed.com), or discuss how the Hero's Journey works in popular films from their childhood (i.e. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc.).
- Provide a template and readings to students.
- Ask students to map out the selected situations and "characters" on a blank storyboard.
- Provide ample discussion time so that students can present their explanations and rationale. Give enthusiastic and positive feedback. For example: "Characterizing Rasputin as a test is a very creative interpretation!"
- Don't force the Hero's Journey into every historical situation. It is a framework to practice analyzing narrative, not a mandate to turn everything into a myth that can be assessed with a five-point rubric.
- Don't be afraid to customize elements to make this easier for students. If there isn't a trickster or transformation in a particular historical event, don't include these terms in your materials.
- Focus on the explanations, not the writing. The important part of the Hero's Journey EduProtocol is that students are taking risks by turning their historical knowledge into literary classifications. Reward risk-taking when you see it.
ELL students may find the six-step Hero's Journey map easier than the more challenging twelve-step journey outlined by Vogler. Remind students that the Hero's Journey is just a more elaborate framework for the three-act story structure (setup, confrontation, resolution). For example, for middle school, consider showing episodes of The Simpsons to review the beginning, middle, and end of stories.
Many teachers use AP essential questions to help students prepare for the end-of-course exam. To what extent did the Watergate scandal create a constitutional crisis? To review for this question, ask students to complete a Hero's Journey story map of the Watergate scandal, emphasizing presidential actions that threatened the checks and balances between our branches of government. To complete this, students sort historical figures and events into the Call to Action, Threshold, Helper, Abyss, Transformation, and Return situational steps in the chart. There are not any right or wrong arguments; the goal is to have student practice explaining why they labeled a person as a certain archetype or identified them as enmeshed in a certain situation.
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Modifications: As a Summative Assessment
Think of the Hero's Journey EduProtocol as a creative formative or summative assessment. When used before a unit, the concept sort helps the teacher understand what students already know about the content. When used after a unit, teachers can assess their students' understanding of the concepts presented. Conceptual change programs that challenge students to elaborate on concept development by explaining examples and non-examples have a .99 effect size, according to Hattie. Thus, teachers who use the Hero's Journey EduProtocol consistently can expect to see more than two years of academic growth with their students!
