A Raisin In The Sun Anticipation Guide

Using an Anticipation Guide With A Raisin In The Sun

An anticipation guide is a pre-reading tool. Students read a set of statements tied to the major themes of a text and mark whether they agree or disagree before they start reading. The point isn't to get answers right. It's to surface assumptions so the text hits differently when they actually read it. Here's how I build one for A Raisin In The Sun Anticipation Guide without turning it into busywork.

A Raisin In The Sun Anticipation Guide

I start with the statements. Not plot summaries. Statements that force a position. Something like: "Sacrificing your dreams for your family is always the right choice." "Homeownership is a basic right, not a privilege."

"It's acceptable to break a promise if circumstances change." "Racial discrimination is mostly in the past now." "Money solves family problems more often than it creates them."

Five to eight statements is the sweet spot. More than that and students coast through without thinking. Fewer than four and you're not covering enough thematic ground. The format matters. I give them a simple table: statement on the left, two columns for Agree and Disagree, plus a third column labeled "Why." The "Why" column is where the actual learning happens. Without it, this becomes a checkbox exercise. I have them do this individually first. Then I pair them up. The pair discussion usually takes five minutes and creates enough friction to make the first act feel like it's actually addressing something.

What actually goes wrong

Students treat anticipation guides like surveys with right answers. They'll agree with whatever sounds morally defensible rather than what they actually believe. I ran into this hard with a group last year where every single student agreed with "Walter's decision to gamble the insurance money was justified." No one pushed back. When I asked why no one disagreed, the silence was telling. They'd learned to perform agreement rather than take a position. My workaround was to flip it. I told them to pick the statement they disagreed with the most and argue for it, even if they didn't actually disagree. Forced perspective broke the pattern. By act two, people were volunteering disagreements without being prompted. Another problem: the statements are too vague. "Discrimination is bad" isn't a statement anyone disagrees with. That's a tautology, not a provocation. Every statement needs to be genuinely debatable. If you can predict unanimous agreement, rewrite it.

Timing and integration

I do the anticipation guide in the first fifteen minutes of class, right after attendance. Then we read the first act. The second class session starts with a ten-minute discussion comparing their initial positions to what they actually encountered in the text. Some students change their minds. Some double down. Both outcomes are useful. After the play ends, I have them revisit the same guide. This time with evidence from the text. The contrast between round one and round three is usually where the deepest analysis comes from, and it requires zero extra lesson planning on my part. One thing I don't do: I never grade the first round. It's formative by design. Grading it turns reflection into performance and you lose the honest positioning you're trying to surface. The second round, after they've read the text, I will hold them accountable to their evidence.

Statements that actually work

Here's a fuller set I've used successfully across multiple years. These tend to generate the most productive disagreement: "A person should prioritize their family's needs over their own ambitions." "Accepting charity from family members creates an unhealthy power dynamic."

"Segregation would disappear if Black families simply moved into white neighborhoods without resistance." "Keeping your word matters more than the consequences of keeping it." "Dreams are worth pursuing even if they risk destroying your current life."

"Women in this family are treated unfairly by the men in it." "Material success is the best measure of a life well lived." Each one maps directly to a central conflict in the play. Ruth versus Walter on the apartment. Lena versus Walter on the money. Beneatha versus everyone on her career. The connections are there if you let them surface organically rather than pointing them out explicitly.

When this approach doesn't work

Anticipation guides assume students can engage with abstract statements. Some reading levels struggle with that leap. If your class has a lot of students at emerging reader levels, the statements need to be more concrete and contextualized. I'll sometimes add a brief scenario before the statement to ground it. Instead of just "Dreams are worth pursuing even if they risk destroying your current life," I'll preface it with a one-line setup about someone who risks everything for a chance at something better. The guide also falls flat if you don't actually use the results. If you collect it and file it, students notice. The activity needs visible follow-through. I project the class responses anonymously after round one and reference specific positions throughout the reading. That signals the work mattered. I've also seen teachers turn anticipation guides into argument writing prompts, which is a valid extension but changes the purpose entirely. The guide itself is a diagnostic tool, not an assignment generator. Don't conflate the two.

What to avoid

Don't include statements that are purely factual. "The Younger family is poor" is something the text establishes directly. That belongs in a comprehension check, not an anticipation guide. Don't use statements that require knowledge students haven't been given yet. If the statement references a specific historical event from the play's era and you haven't covered that context, you're testing prior knowledge rather than surfacing assumptions. A quick five-minute context drop before distributing the guide fixes that. And don't make every statement about race. The play engages with race, but it's also about ambition, gender, generational conflict, and the meaning of home. A guide that only covers one dimension gives students a narrow entry point into a text that operates on several at once.

Practical details

I print these as a single half-sheet. Double-sided if I want room for notes on the back. Students use pens for the first round and pencils for the revision round so they can edit their positions. The material cost is negligible and the setup time is under ten minutes total. I keep a master copy of my statement bank and rotate three or four each semester based on which discussions I found most productive. If you're looking for a ready-made A Raisin In The Sun Anticipation Guide, the structure above is straightforward enough to build yourself in about fifteen minutes. Pre-made versions exist on teacher resource sites but they tend to be padded with weak statements and unnecessary fluff. The ones I described here are the ones I've refined over several years of actually using them in classrooms. The value isn't in the document. It's in the conversation that follows. Get the statements right and the rest takes care of itself.