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The Ultimate Guide to One-Pagers in ELA

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Why do you need the Ultimate Guide to One-Pagers? Open The New York Times today and you’ll see photos, headlines, interactive infographics, audio, videos, and text articles. I could name almost any newspaper, magazine, social media platform, campaign website, or brand home page, and say the same.

Communication today switches mediums like a chameleon switches colors wandering in a field of Skittles.

Our students know communication has changed. They need practice sharing ideas in different mediums and weaving those mediums together.

Enter, one-pagers, an easy on-ramp for communicating through multiple mediums at once. Students learn to play with color, icons, and imagery that complement their quotations and analysis in bringing home their ideas.

Today I want to walk you through everything I’ve learned about one-pagers over the last decade or so working with them. We’ll start with the nuts and bolts of what they are in a quick review, and then talk about where to find models, why templates are such a helpful scaffold, what elements you might require on your one-pagers, and a laundry list of ways to use them creatively in class. Oh, and we’ll wrap up with some ideas for other projects and strategies you might try in class if you love one-pagers.

What’s a One-Pager?

A one-pager is pretty self explanatory. In the working world, a one-pager is a consolidated summary of an issue or program that someone can create to help someone else catch up quickly. Picture a staffer who focuses on environmental issues catching a senator up on a proposal for a new solar program, or a teacher sharing a new pedagogy strategy with her department. The idea is to pack alllll of what’s most important into a single page to help the reader go straight to the key ideas without wasting any time.

I created these one-pagers to describe three of my favorite ELA strategies:

In education, the AVID program first adapted the one-pager to the classroom, as far as I can tell, and many educators have added their own layered ideas to what a one-pager can be in schools. In education, like in the world outside of schools, a one-pager is a chance to cut to the core and show what you know. Students need to boil down their takeaways from their learning and present it all back in a single page.

While this could be a wonderful assessment in any discipline, it’s been most popular in ELA as a novel assessment. Today we’re going to get into many other options though – in just a bit…

One-Pager Models

Seeing the one-pager in action makes it easier to visualize, so let’s start with some one-pager models.

I’m a big fan of using templates with one-pagers, as you can see in the models above. Let’s take a look at a few more from social media below, where you can see hundreds (if not thousands) of exemplars through the #onepagers search.

Why Use One-Pager Templates?

One-pagers don’t have to be broken up into sections on the page. In fact, you’ve probably seen some pretty stunning ones on a blank piece of paper. For artistic students, the freedom to create whatever they want across the page is wonderful.

But for many students, the gentle creative constraint of a template gives a roadmap for a successful one-pager. You simply match the elements you want students to add to their one-pager with specific areas of the page. With this clear play-by-play in front of them, students who may feel intimidated by art know how to start and what to do.

What Elements Belong on a One-Pager?

As you’re creating a template, you need elements to match to the sections of your page. So what goes on a one-pager?

Well, it depends on what knowledge your students are showcasing. For a novel-based one-pager, you might invite sections on writing style, characterization, themes, symbolism, etc. Take a look at the example directions below, and the matching template to the right.

You’ll notice that the directions also help guide students in exploring the components of the one-pager in text AND visuals. Again, for some students, it feels very natural to showcase their ideas with words AND sketches, icons, and color. For students who haven’t had much practice conveying their ideas with visuals, it’s helpful to give those reminders.

Moving beyond novel-based one-pagers, just follow a similar format with whatever content you’re inviting students to analyze through their one-pager when developing project directions. For a poetry one-pager, you might have sections on poetic devices, themes, connections to other poems, connections to current events, one key quotation that’s representative of the main idea of the piece, etc.

We’ll get more into different types of one-pagers soon.

What if Students Still Struggle with the Art Aspects of One-Pagers?

By providing a template and specific instructions for the various elements in your one-pager assignment, you’ll give most students a doable path. But you may have some students who would really prefer not to try to do any art by hand, and in today’s world, there are a lot of digital options they can use instead. So it’s nice to call those options out so students feel comfortable moving in that direction.

Google Slides is an easily accessible option for digital one-pagers, but if possible, using a free Canva for Education account would be my recommendation. If you’re new to Canva, here’s a quick, free mini-course for educators to help you get familiar with it.

Inside Canva (or Slides, or Photoshop, etc.), students can follow the same path of matching elements to areas of the page, but with options to tweak colors, add images and icons, and change fonts with the program. Plus, they’ll be developing online graphic design skills that will likely serve them in many other arenas.

Novel One-Pagers

When you’re crafting a one-pager assignment for a novel, you can choose to focus on any aspects of the reading that you wish. Consider how students might integrate key quotations, representative imagery, a vital symbol, a look at one (or more) key characters, the author’s writing style, and whatever else you want.

Here’s an example set of requirements:

  • A border which somehow represents the key themes from what you have read
  • An image in the upper left hand corner with a quotation woven into or around it. This image should somehow represent what you consider to be the most important symbol in the text so far.
  • Images and/or doodled words in the upper right hand corner that represent the key characters from the text and perhaps how they are changing
  • Images and quotations in the lower left hand corner that show the author’s style of writing,and the power of the language that is used
  • Images and/or words in the bottom right hand corner that show connections between the themes and ideas in the writing and what is going on in the world today. 
  • Three important quotations from the text
  • Words and/or images that show the significance of the setting in some way

I’ve created a popular free set of four one-pager templates with directions for each and a rubric option. I’ve given away more than 20,000 sets so far, and I’d love to send one over to you too! You can find it here.

Argument One-Pagers

An argument one-pager provides the opportunity for students to practice elements of argument. You can ask them to include a thesis, evidence, analysis, even a counterargument or idea for a related personal story.

An argument one-pager can stand alone as a final unit assessment, or function as a pre-writing activity if you still want students to get practice with a full essay and you have the time.

Podcast One-Pagers

If you’re listening to a podcast episode or series, a podcast one-pager is a helpful way to guide students in listening carefully. You can give them the instructions in advance and ask them to create the one-pager as they listen, or let them know they’ll be creating a one-pager later on and invite them to take notes along the way on the big ideas and takeaways they have which they might wish to include later.

Film One-Pagers

Similarly, a one-pager can help students focus on a film viewing in class, whether it’s a documentary, a movie version of a work you’ve read, or a piece that plays into an essential question in your unit.

If you’re watching a film version of a book you’ve read in class, you might consider focusing the film one-pager on interpretation, with sections on what the film represented well from the book versus areas where it made significant changes, and analysis of those choices.

Icebreaker One-Pagers

One-pagers can also be a vehicle for getting to know students. Whether it’s a straightforward “about me” one pager (pictured above), or a name tent one-pager to make it easier for you to memorize students’ names (pictured below). For this type of one-pager, invite students to share aspects of their lives like their favorite books or songs, career goals or preferred subjects at school, etc.

Characterization One-Pagers

Working on characterization? Invite students to craft a one-pager featuring key characters (or a single character) from your unit, drilling down on how that character is described, how they evolve, how they are represented, whether they really have a voice in the text, and more.

For my characterization one-pager, I decided to add small cartoons of people without faces, to make it easier for students who didn’t feel comfortable drawing people to create a mini-representation of the character. In my required elements, I invited students to choose one descriptive word they felt most captured the character to write over their face.

Ted Talk One-Pagers

If you’d like to play a Ted Talk in class, but it’s sometimes a struggle to keep watching students focused, an in-the-moment one-pager can be a nice way to help students pay attention and track their takeaways. One of my favorite Ted Talks for class is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s, The Danger of a Single Story, which can set up themes to return to throughout any English course. Creating a display of Ted Talk one-pagers around this Ted Talk early in the year will help keep the important themes Adichie brings up top of mind as you move into other units.

Poetry One-Pagers

If you’d like students to dive deep with analysis of a poem, without taking the time for a full essay, a poetry one-pager provides a faster assessment option that still pushes students to think critically about a poem. You can ask them to focus on imagery, key poetic devices, connections between the poem and other works, and the poet’s style. I like to also include the overall question, do you like this poem? (Why or why not?).

Theme One-Pagers

It’s often difficult for students to understand how to identify one complex theme in a work. So for my version of a theme one-pager, I wanted to create a process assignment, that would help them make the journey from some big ideas to a theme statement.

Here’s what I came up with for steps, linked to the areas of the template I created (down below):

Start by choosing several big ideas from the text. If you asked the author, what did you really want to show about humanity by writing this piece?, what kind of big ideas would come up in the conversation? Include these big ideas in the four circles across the top. Consider using color or imagery to help each big idea stand out. 

Next, zero in on the big idea you find most important and interesting. Highlight this one in the large circle at the bottom. You might add images around it, use colors to help it stand out, and/or add some explanation around it. 

Look through the text and find key moments where the author really brings this big idea to the forefront. These could be descriptions, pieces of character development, or chunks of dialogue. Add three key pieces of text to your one-pager in three of the four remaining sections. 

Now add images – sketches, icons, collage – near these key pieces of text. Try to bring them to life for yourself and other viewers with your illustration

Now you’ve got your big idea and your evidence. After studying them and thinking through their meaning carefully,  add your theme statement to your one-pager. This should be big and bold, and clearly highlighted so anyone looking at it would know it’s the core of your one-pager. Add it in the final remaining section.

Shakespeare One-Pagers

My priority in designing a Shakespeare one-pager assignment was for students to connect the play to the world today. Shakespeare can seem so far away to students, but his themes are anything but. So I focused the top section of the template on modern connections, and the bottom on character analysis, asking students to include key quotations as part of their visual analysis.

Rhetorical Analysis One-Pagers

Rhetorical analysis provides a natural visual with its ethos/pathos/logos triangle. For a rhetorical analysis one-pager, create sections for all of the triangles revolving around the one big idea or message of the piece. You can grab my version as a free download right here.

What’s Next if you love One-Pagers?

If you see the benefits of combining verbal and visual communication, here are some more activities you might want to explore. Sketchnotes are like an on-the-go version of one-pagers, inviting students to use their critical thinking to choose what’s most important to highlight in their notes and combine visuals and words to showcase that important information. Through dual coding – using both sides of their brain – students taking sketchnotes will end up remembering more of the information than they would by simply writing down exactly what they hear. Dive deeper with this sketchnotes guide.

The Open Mind activity for characterization is like a cousin to a one-pager, inside a character’s head. You can read all about it in this fun roundup of creative characterization activities.

In my version of the one-word project, in which students choose a word to guide their year and elaborate on it with specific goals, visuals also play a role. Their one-word becomes a sort of one-pager of their future. You can learn more about this activity here.

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