What makes a novel “great”? Tenth graders were challenged to answer this central question in their English classes by their teachers Susheela Robinson and Evan Brooke this year. “The Great Works Project” held on Wednesday night in MacDonald Hall was a celebration of what the students concluded qualified as a great work based on their reading of their chosen novels.

The evening was a culmination of a year’s worth of work for the students, highlighted by the display of each student’s poster on their chosen book as well as presentations by the five finalists who, like all their classmates, were vying to have their selected book become a part of the tenth grade English curriculum for the 2014-2015 school year.

Five finalists were chosen through classroom contests to present their books on Wednesday evening to the assembled audience. Chris Currie and his book A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines, Dylan Mitchell who chose Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Richard Royle’s choice of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley represented the students from the English 10 classes. The finalists for the Honors English class were Stephanie Quintero and her book A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess as well as Bobby Radecki defending his choice of Khaled Hosseini’sThe Kite Runner.

In the end, Royle and Radecki were chosen the winners for their respective course as determined by a panel of judges that included former St. Andrew’s English teacher Dr. Delice Williams, Religion instructor Troy Dahlke, Visual Arts department chair Lauren Cook, and History teacher Glenn Whitman.

Robinson, St. Andrew’s English department chair and English 10 teacher, and Brooke, the tenth grade Honors English teacher, conceived of the project this past summer with the help of an Innovative Teaching grant from St. Andrew’s Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning.

As they designed the project, they considered “What happens when students are allowed to develop a passion or choose a book or investigate a concept of their choice? How does fostering a coaching relationship with students, where they can develop their own voice with guidance from a teacher who knows them, impact lasting learning and intellectual curiosity?”

Throughout this academic year, Robinson and Brooke encouraged students to grapple with what constitutes greatness in a work of literature. Students were asked, “Why have some works been deemed great and others not?” and “What are society’s requirements versus our own personal ones?”

Upon examining these questions and applying them the texts they had read this year, which included their summer reading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, George Orwell’s 1984, Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Jean Rhys’s Wild Sargasso Sea, students were then tasked with picking a book they would defend as great in three ways: verbally, visually, and orally.

Each book had to meet certain criteria. The book had to meet at least two of the following prerequisites: it is considered a “classic”/part of the “canon”, it is popular with mass appeal, it has a cult following, it is still in print despite being written years ago, it has won major awards, it has been positively reviewed by prominent critics, or it has inspired literary criticism.

According to Brooke, the fact that students were given the chance to choose their own books was important to the project’s success as “Choice leads to buy-in which then leads to commitment. And most of the students were really committed to the project.”

“A real strength of the exercise was that it allowed students to defend their choice in three ways: through writing a short persuasive essay, a poster which allowed them to expand their perspectives on the text by exploring their own connection to the story and examining the writer’s life, and having to defend their book orally to their classmates in a dynamic, persuasive speech,” she said.

For Robinson, the beauty of the project was that students could be successful in one or all of those areas. In her opinion, a key element of the project was giving students a “more authentic learning experience. We wanted students to think critically about a topic and then articulate it in a number of ways.”

Whitman, the director for the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, who spoke at the evening’s proceedings, championed the project and both teachers’ work with their students when he stated, “One of the most compelling areas of brain research is around providing students’ choice and how it enhances engagement. The quality of the projects that surround us tonight further validate that research and thus the chief beneficiaries of the innovative work of Ms. Robinson and Ms. Brooke are each of their students. So congratulations to everyone.”