What an Anticipation Guide Actually Does for Frankenstein
An anticipation guide is just a list of debatable statements given to students before they read a text, with instructions to mark agree or disagree. Then after reading, they revisit those same statements and either maintain or change their positions, using textual evidence to justify any switch. It sounds simple because it is simple, but the quality of the statements on that guide determines whether the exercise is a ten-minute waste or a genuinely useful scaffolding tool. I have seen both outcomes, repeatedly, across more literature classes than I care to count. The problem most teachers run into is that the statements end up being either too obvious or too vague. "Frankenstein is a scary book" gives you nothing to work with. "The creature is more moral than his creator" is at least arguable, but only if you've actually read the novel and paid attention to the structure of the narrative. Frankenstein Anticipation Guide Answers tend to succeed when the statements target the book's core tensions: responsibility, nature versus nurture, ambition, isolation, the role of science, and the ambiguity of sympathy.
How to Write Statements That Actually Work
The statements need to sit in a genuine interpretive gray zone. Something a reasonable person could argue either way before having read the book. Here are statements I have used and watched students actually wrestle with over several years of teaching this novel: Each of these forces a student to take a position without relying on plot knowledge. That is the whole point. They commit to a stance based on prior belief or intuition, and the text either confirms, complicates, or completely undermines that stance. The tension between what they thought and what the text shows is where learning actually happens. Skipping that step and just handing out an answer key defeats the entire mechanism. I lay it out as a two-column chart with a third column for notes. Column one is Agree, column two is Disagree, and the third is left blank for post-reading revision. Students mark an X or check one box per statement before they begin Chapter 1. They reread the guide after they finish the novel, mark a second set of responses, and write a brief justification for any change. That justification is nonnegotiable. A changed answer without evidence is just a guess, and guesses do not count toward any grade I have ever given.
I usually assign this after Chapter 4, right after Victor finishes his experiments and begins his descent. At that point students have enough of the text under their belt to recognize how Shelley structures the shifting sympathies, but they have not finished the book yet, so the post-reading revision still carries real weight. The document typically takes about five minutes to distribute and explain. Students spend maybe ten minutes on the initial responses. The post-reading portion, including justifications, runs closer to twenty to thirty minutes depending on how closely they are writing.
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A Problem I Hit and How I Fixed It
A few years ago I gave a version of this guide to a class that included several students who had only encountered Frankenstein through film adaptations. By the time they reached the initial responses, nearly everyone had already answered every statement based on the movies rather than the book. Their answers were internally consistent but completely detached from Shelley's text. That defeated the purpose of the exercise because the whole point was to let the book challenge your assumptions, not to confirm assumptions you picked up from a 1930s horror film. The fix was to add a single instruction at the top of the guide: before you answer, write down where your opinion comes from. If you have not read the book, you must base your answers on general knowledge, not on a specific movie or retelling. I also had them highlight any statement they felt confident about and circle the ones they were unsure of. That small adjustment forced a level of metacognition that kept most of them honest. It did not eliminate the problem entirely, but it reduced the distortion significantly. Students who had only seen films ended up changing their positions at higher rates in the post-reading section, which was exactly what I wanted.
Common Pitfalls That Sabotage the Exercise
The biggest mistake is treating the anticipation guide as a quiz. It is not. If you grade the first set of responses for accuracy, students will game the system on the second set, flipping answers to match what they think you want to hear rather than what the text actually supports. Second mistake: using statements that are purely factual disguised as opinions. "The creature kills William" is a plot detail, not an interpretive claim. Those statements belong on a comprehension check, not an anticipation guide. A third mistake is not giving students enough text to work with before they revisit the guide. I have seen teachers hand out the post-reading version after only two chapters. The students have barely encountered the creature's voice yet, let alone the full narrative arc. Their revisions end up shallow because the text has not given them the material to revise against. If you are using this as a full novel study, do the second pass after Chapter 20 at minimum. If you are using it in an abridged version, wait until the creature has told his story in full. There is also a limitation worth acknowledging. Anticipation guides assume students can handle abstract, debatable claims in writing. Some students, particularly those who struggle with reading or academic English, will simply repeat the statement word for word and write "I agree" in both columns. In those cases the guide needs to be paired with sentence starters or a structured discussion that forces them to engage with the actual claim rather than the act of choosing a box. I usually do a brief whole-class discussion on two or three of the hardest statements before they do the post-reading revision, and that discussion cuts down on blank or pointless responses by a noticeable margin.
Where to Find or Build Your Own Version
You will find pre-made Frankenstein Anticipation Guide Answers on teacher resource sites, educational marketplaces, and school district shared drives. The quality varies enormously. Some are competent. Some are full of statements that read like middle-school worksheets. My advice is to use whatever you find as a starting point, then rewrite at least half the statements yourself to match your class's reading level and the specific focus of your unit. A statement like "Ambition always leads to ruin" works fine as a generic prompt, but it is too broad for most high schoolers. "Victor Frankenstein's ambition causes more suffering than it prevents" is narrower, more text-specific, and forces a more precise engagement with the novel. If you are looking for a ready-to-use set, search for Frankenstein Anticipation Guide Answers on your district's curriculum portal first. Those versions are usually vetted by English department heads and aligned to your state standards. If that is not available, the Educational Testing Service sample items and the MLA teaching resources pages sometimes have adaptable versions. Anything you pull from a free teacher repository should be cross-checked against the text before you print it. A common error in downloaded versions is misattributing quotes or conflating Victor with the creature in ways that make the statements factually confusing rather than interpretively useful. The tool works when the statements are genuinely debatable and when students have real text to reference during the revision phase. It does not work when you treat it as busy work or when you skip the evidence requirement on changes. Given that it takes roughly fifteen minutes of class time total and can surface a surprisingly clear picture of what students believe about the novel before they have read it, it is worth doing carefully rather than quickly.
