Research for Teachers

One of the easiest traps to fall into as a teacher is assuming that engagement automatically means students are being challenged.

I have done this myself.

A few years ago, I taught Tae Keller’s When You Trap a Tiger to a Grade 8 class. The novel worked beautifully in many ways. Students connected deeply with the story. They were invested in the characters, fascinated by the magical realism, and eager to discuss themes of family, grief, storytelling, and identity. Discussions were lively. Students read ahead at home. Some even told me it was one of the first novels they genuinely enjoyed reading.

At the time, I viewed the unit as a success.

Looking back now, I still think it was successful. But I also think I missed opportunities to push students further intellectually, especially those who were ready for greater complexity.

Not because the text lacked depth.

Because I stopped at engagement.

That distinction matters more than I realized at the time.

In literacy classrooms, we often focus heavily on supporting struggling readers, and rightly so. Scaffolding, vocabulary instruction, modelling, and background knowledge are essential for helping students access challenging texts. But there is another problem that receives less attention: what happens when students can access a text comfortably, enjoy it, and then remain there without being pushed toward deeper literary thinking?

Students who are engaged still deserve challenge.

In fact, engagement may create the ideal conditions for challenge because students are already emotionally invested in the reading experience.

This became clearer to me when I began reflecting not on what students understood about When You Trap a Tiger, but on the kinds of thinking I had invited them to do.

We discussed plot, themes, and emotional responses extensively. We explored magical realism as a genre and examined the blending of Korean folklore with contemporary narrative. But I now think I could have moved students more deliberately toward literary analysis itself.

We could have examined how Keller manipulates narrative voice to shape emotional intimacy with the protagonist. We could have tracked recurring symbolism surrounding the tiger stories and examined how folklore functions structurally throughout the novel. We could have compared passages where reality and fantasy blur and discussed why authors use ambiguity intentionally.

Most importantly, we could have spent more time treating students like literary critics rather than simply thoughtful readers.

That shift matters because sophisticated reading is not only about comprehension. It is also about interpretation, analysis, comparison, and argument.

Too often, enrichment is framed as “more work” rather than “deeper thinking.” But students who are ready for challenge do not necessarily need longer assignments or additional novels. They often need richer questions.

This is especially important for high-ability learners. Subotnik et al. (2011) argue that advanced learners require opportunities for increasing complexity, specialization, and deliberate intellectual challenge if their abilities are to continue developing over time. While their work focuses broadly on giftedness, the principle applies meaningfully in English classrooms: potential grows when students are consistently invited into deeper levels of disciplinary thinking.

In literature classrooms, this means helping students move beyond identifying literary devices toward examining how and why authors make particular choices.

For example, instead of asking students to identify symbolism, we might ask:

Why does Keller repeatedly return to tiger imagery at emotionally vulnerable moments in the novel?

Or instead of discussing whether magical realism appears in the text, we might ask:

How does magical realism allow the novel to explore grief differently than realism alone could?

Those questions shift students from comprehension into interpretation.

And importantly, these opportunities should not be reserved only for students formally identified as gifted.

One thing I increasingly question in literacy instruction is the assumption that challenge and support exist in opposition to one another. In reality, classrooms need both simultaneously. Some students need scaffolds to access a text. Others need extensions that deepen analysis. Often, the same student needs both depending on the task.

Research on adolescent literacy increasingly emphasizes this idea of responsive instruction. Reynolds and Fisher (2022), for example, argue that difficulty emerges in particular moments during reading, not uniformly across entire texts. I think the same is true for intellectual challenge. Students may move fluidly between needing support and needing extension within the same unit.

That realization changed how I think about planning.

Now, when designing novel studies, I try to think less about whether students “liked” a text and more about what kinds of thinking the text makes possible.

Can students compare narrative structures?

Can they analyze ambiguity?

Can they examine competing interpretations?

Can they trace patterns across passages?

Can they defend claims with textual evidence?

Those are the kinds of questions that move students toward disciplinary literacy — toward reading not simply as consumers of stories, but as participants in literary interpretation.

Ironically, When You Trap a Tiger probably offered more opportunities for this kind of thinking than I recognized at the time.

Because beneath its accessibility is a remarkably sophisticated novel.

And perhaps that is the lesson I keep returning to: accessibility and complexity are not opposites.

A text can be emotionally engaging, highly readable, and still intellectually demanding.

Students can love a novel and still deserve more challenge within it.

Engagement is not the endpoint.

It is often the doorway.

References

Reynolds, D., & Fisher, W. (2022). What happens when adolescents meet complex texts? Describing moments of scaffolding textual encounters. Literacy, 56(4), 277–287. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12258

Subotnik, R. F., Olszewski-Kubilius, P., & Worrell, F. C. (2011). Rethinking giftedness and gifted education: A proposed direction forward based on psychological science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 12(1), 3–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100611418056