The task asks students to identify the cycle of the hero’s journey in a text, analyze the effectiveness of this technique, and apply what they learned to their own lives or a contemporary situation.
Students will read their choice book after a library resource visit or from a teacher-generated list of texts that use the hero’s journey structure. Students will receive several mini-lessons and activities on the hero cycle. Students will follow a writing process to compose an analytical essay to demonstrate their comprehension of their novel and application of the hero cycle as a structure. They will explain the elements of the hero’s journey and how those elements relate to the events in their novel. They will analyze how the hero’s journey shows the protagonist’s development and evaluate the effectiveness of the author’s technique. Students conclude by drawing a lesson from what they learned in the analysis; the conclusion should go beyond repeating what is in the essay to connect the analysis to the student’s life.
Students will include multiple correctly cited examples from both the novel and additional texts to support their analysis.
