Anticipation Guides for Literature: What They Actually Do in the Classroom
An anticipation guide is a pre-reading strategy where students evaluate a series of statements before engaging with a text, then revisit those same statements after reading to see how their understanding has shifted. It sounds straightforward, but most teachers execute it poorly because they treat it as a fill-in-the-blank worksheet rather than a genuine cognitive tool. The value isn't in the agreement or disagreement marks. It's in the specific moment when a student's prior assumption collides with what the text actually presents. I've used anticipation guides across multiple units, and here's the practical version for Richard Connell's short story. You create roughly 8 to 10 statements drawn from the story's core themes and moral questions. Students read each statement and mark agree, disagree, or uncertain. Then they read the story. Afterward, they return to every statement and revise their position if their reading changed it. The critical part is requiring a brief written justification for any change. Here are statements that actually work well for this text, based on what I've seen produce meaningful discussion over the years:
- Humans have the right to hunt other humans for sport.
- Hunting is only different from murder because of legal definitions.
- Sanity and savagery exist in everyone under the right conditions.
- Wealthy people like General Zaroff have a responsibility to use their power wisely.
- Survival justifies any action a person takes.
- Prejudice about who counts as "civilized" is a theme in this story.
- A person can be both highly intelligent and deeply morally bankrupt.
- The setting of the story shapes how characters behave more than their personality does.
- It is acceptable to view another living being as less than human if it helps you survive.
- The story suggests that fear can make people do things they would never normally do. You don't need all ten. Pick the ones that matter for your class. The statements should be debatable, text-supported, and connected to the themes you're actually grading on. Here is how I run it in practice. I post the statements on the board or hand out the sheet before reading begins. Students work individually for about five minutes. Then I put them into pairs for three minutes to argue their positions. The pair discussion is where you actually learn what they think. I then do a quick whole-class share of three or four statements before we start reading. This takes maybe eight minutes total. During reading, I have them underline or annotate passages that confirm or contradict their answers. After reading, they return to the guide and revise. The revision step is where the learning happens.
I ran into a specific problem one year that taught me something useful. I assigned a guide I'd created quickly, and after reading, almost every student changed every single answer to align with what they assumed the teacher wanted. The activity became performance instead of thinking. I realized my statements were too obviously moralistic and pointed toward a single "right" interpretation. So I rewrote the guide with more nuanced statements and added a rule: if you change your answer, you have to cite a specific passage that made you change your mind, and that passage cannot be the only evidence you rely on. I also started including at least two statements that remained genuinely ambiguous even after reading. That small structural change cut the echo-chamber effect down significantly. Students who had been coasting on guessing what I wanted suddenly had to engage with the text to support any shift in position. The biggest mistake I see is making the anticipation guide too long or making statements that are purely factual about the plot. If a statement asks whether Rainsford falls overboard, that's a reading comprehension check, not an anticipation guide item. The statements need to be evaluative and open to interpretation. Another common error is skipping the post-reading revision. Without that second pass, the exercise is just a warm-up with no closure. Students forget they ever saw the statements. The whole point is the before-and-after comparison. Pitfalls to watch for. Some students will treat the initial responses as permanent. They won't revise even when the text clearly undermines their position. This is usually because they interpret changing their answer as being wrong rather than being thoughtful. I address this explicitly on day one by telling them that changing your mind based on evidence is the goal, not a punishment. Another issue is that weaker readers will struggle to justify revisions because they haven't actually processed the text deeply. Pairing the revision with a short paragraph response that requires textual citation helps force engagement at that level.
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What this doesn't do. An anticipation guide will not improve reading comprehension on its own. It won't teach vocabulary, close reading skills, or literary analysis techniques. It's a focused tool for activating prior knowledge and tracking conceptual change around specific thematic questions. If your students haven't read the story yet and you expect them to analyze symbolism without any direct instruction, this guide alone won't get you there. Use it alongside discussion, annotation, and explicit teaching of literary concepts. It works best when it's one part of a larger lesson architecture, not the entire lesson. Alternative if you need something faster. If you're short on time or your students struggle with open-ended statement evaluation, a simpler question list works. Instead of agree-disagree statements, give them three direct questions to answer before and after reading. Example: What does Zaroff believe about the weak and the strong? How does Rainsford's view of hunting change from the beginning to the end? Who is the real monster? This skips the format but keeps the before-and-after structure with the same cognitive demand. Timing estimate. A well-prepared anticipation guide for this story takes about five minutes to create if you already have a bank of thematic statements. If you're building from scratch, budget twenty to thirty minutes. The classroom implementation runs about fifteen to twenty minutes total across the full cycle, depending on how much discussion you allow. Students need access to the text during the revision phase, so plan for that logistical detail.
The method is simple enough that you don't need a fancy system to run it. You need clear statements, a requirement to cite text when revising, and the willingness to let students hold uncomfortable positions that the story complicates rather than resolves.
