Teaching The Sun Also Rises in three or four weeks leaves little room for slack. Students need time to absorb the style, track a cast of characters, and develop an argument. The assessments you choose along the way determine whether they arrive at the final essay ready or overwhelmed.

Start by working backward. Decide what you want students to be able to do at the end, and design smaller tasks that build each piece. If the final task is a literary analysis essay, then the earlier assessments should practice thesis writing, evidence selection, and commentary separately.

This approach also spreads the grading load. Instead of one enormous stack at the end of the unit, you receive smaller pieces throughout, each giving you information you can act on. Problems surface earlier, when they are still easy to fix.

The plan below assumes a unit of about four weeks, but it can be compressed or stretched to fit your calendar.

Low-Stakes Checks During Reading

Short reading checks keep students on track without becoming busywork. A five-minute quick write at the start of class, asking what a character wants and what is getting in the way, tells you who did the reading and who is confused. These can be graded for completion so the stakes stay low.

• Week one: a quick write on Jake's narration and what he chooses not to say
• Week two: a paragraph pairing one quotation with a short explanation of its meaning
• Week two: a character map showing how the group's relationships shift during the fiesta
• Week three: a thesis workshop where students draft and revise three possible claims
• Week four: a timed in-class paragraph practicing evidence and commentary

The Draft Stage

A draft submission with feedback is the most valuable assessment in the unit. Students take feedback most seriously when they have a chance to use it. Even a light-touch review that flags the two biggest issues can raise the quality of the final essay noticeably.

To keep the workload sane, limit draft feedback to a few targeted comments and a score on one or two criteria. Full scoring on every dimension can wait for the final version. This keeps your time focused where it matters most.

Designing the Final Essay

Offer a choice of two or three prompts so students can pursue what interests them. Make sure each prompt can be graded with the same rubric, so scoring stays fair. Share the rubric when you introduce the assignment, not after students have finished writing.

Give a realistic timeline. Students need at least a week between the draft and the final submission to revise meaningfully. Rushing that window defeats the purpose of having a draft at all.

Handling the Workload

More assessments mean more grading, and a plan that ignores that reality will collapse. Decide which tasks get detailed feedback, which get a quick check, and which are graded on completion only. Being honest about your capacity is what keeps a good plan running to the end of the unit.

Teachers who use AI feedback tools like GraideMind often lean on them for the draft stage, generating rubric-based comments they can review before returning papers. That makes an extra round of feedback realistic even in a full schedule. The result is a unit that assesses students often without burying you in paper.