Anticipation Guide For Of Mice And Men

What an Anticipation Guide Actually Is

An anticipation guide is a pre-reading instructional strategy where teachers present a series of statements connected to a text's major themes, and students record whether they agree or disagree before engaging with the material. It is not a quiz. It is not an assessment. The purpose is to activate prior knowledge and create a personal stake in what comes next. The core mechanic is straightforward. You take the key themes from the novel and convert them into declarative statements that students can take a position on. For Of Mice and Men specifically, the central themes include friendship, loneliness, the American Dream, disability, power dynamics between men and women, and the tension between dreams and reality. Here is a working set of statements:

• Friends should always put each other first, even if it causes harm.
• Most people have a realistic chance at achieving their dreams if they work hard enough.
• People with physical or mental disabilities are a burden to society.
• Loneliness is a sign of personal weakness.
• Predetermination or fate controls most people's lives more than their own choices do.
• Strength and physical power give a person more respect than kindness does.
• It is acceptable to end a life to spare someone from suffering.
• Women in the working class have more power than they appear to have.

That last one is useful because it catches students off guard. Curley's wife is not a hero, but she wields a particular kind of social power in the bunkhouse that beginners often miss. Having that statement in the guide forces a conversation early on. If you are looking to use this directly in a classroom setting, the guide above is functional as written. The statements are deliberately provocative without being misleading. Each one maps onto a specific argument the novel makes, and several of them sit in productive tension with each other. Statement number one and statement number seven, for instance, directly mirror George's final decision. Students who marked agreement on both will feel that dissonance when they reach the ending, and that dissonance is exactly the point. The typical sequence runs like this: distribute the guide, have students mark agree or disagree in writing, optionally have them write a one-sentence justification, then set it aside. After reading, return to the same statements and ask students to reconsider. The revision step is where actual learning happens. Reading the novel and then re-examining your initial position forces you to reconcile what you believed with what the text demonstrated.

I spent years using anticipation guides with high school English students, and the most consistent problem I ran into was students who treated the initial responses as final answers rather than starting points. They would write "disagree" on the disability statement and refuse to reconsider because it conflicted with their stated identity. I solved this by explicitly telling them that changing their mind after reading was not admitting defeat. It was the intended outcome. The language matters. If you frame revision as failure, you get defensive silence. If you frame it as evidence of engagement, you get actual reflection.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The biggest error teachers make is making the statements too vague. "People should treat others fairly" is the kind of statement that gets universal agreement and produces zero discussion. The statements need to be specific enough that reasonable people can disagree, but accurate enough that the novel takes a clear position on them. Another frequent mistake is skipping the post-reading response. Collecting the guides after the pre-reading phase and never returning to them wastes the entire exercise. The pedagogical value sits entirely in the comparison between the two passes. Without that second look, you have just given students a worksheet with no follow-through. A third mistake is including statements that the novel does not actually address. Of Mice and Men is a compact novella with focused concerns. Piling in tangential statements about race relations, while relevant to the broader 1930s context, dilutes the guide because the text itself does not engage those questions directly enough to support meaningful reconsideration on those specific items.

When This Approach Falls Short

Anticipation guides assume a certain level of reading maturity. Students who skim or skip chapters entirely will produce secondhand responses based on cultural clichés rather than textual evidence. The guide cannot compensate for students who do not actually read the novel. In those cases, the post-reading reconsideration step breaks down because there is nothing concrete to reconsider against. There is also a risk of forcing false equivalences. Some of the statements in an Of Mice and Men guide land on morally unambiguous territory by the end of the novel. The disability statement, for example, is clearly contradicted by the text's compassion toward Crooks and Candy's dog. Running a neutral discussion on that one can feel forced. It is sometimes better to acknowledge that certain passages resolve the question rather than pretending the novel leaves it open. If your students are struggling significantly with reading comprehension, you might consider pairing the anticipation guide with a chapter-by-chapter discussion format instead. The structural simplicity of an anticipation guide works best when students can actually engage with the full text. When that foundation is missing, a guided reading protocol with embedded questions tends to produce more reliable results.

What to Do After the Post-Reading Review

Once students have revisited the statements, the next step is usually a short written response or discussion prompt. Ask them to pick one statement where their position changed and explain which passage or scene caused the shift. This requirement anchors their reflection in textual evidence rather than vague sentiment. A student who says "I changed my mind about friendship" has not done the work. A student who writes "I agreed initially that friends should always prioritize each other, but Chapter 4 showed me how that thinking isolates Lennie and ultimately leads to the farm falling apart" has. The anticipation guide functions as a diagnostic tool as much as a discussion starter. Reviewing the initial responses before the post-reading revision reveals what assumptions students bring into the text. Those assumptions shape how they interpret character motivation, symbolism, and Steinbeck's thematic choices. Knowing where your students start lets you adjust your teaching in real time rather than discovering the gap after the unit is over. The whole process, from distribution through post-reading review, typically takes about 45 minutes across two class periods. The pre-reading session runs 20 minutes if you keep the justification brief. The post-reading session takes another 20 to 25 minutes depending on how deeply students engage with the revision step. Anything longer usually means the discussion has drifted into areas the novel does not support, and it is time to bring it back to specific textual evidence.