When I presented the summative essay assignment for the novel Grendel, a general groan went around my 10th-grade honors English class. Then the kvetching began.
“What if we worked in groups?”
“What if we acted out the book in front of the class? Each group could do a chapter! I’ll dress up as Grendel!”
“What if we worked in groups and made videos that incorporated the philosophies of the book?”
I paused. This last suggestion came from one of my strongest students and sounded like a serious attempt to meet the same goals in a different form.
At my Jewish day school, Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School (NJ), students learn from an early age to question and make connections through their Judaic learning. They're taught to wrestle with big questions—a way of thinking that carries into their secular studies. I try to tap into that creativity because I believe that a climate of inquiry breeds curiosity.
So instead of shutting the idea down, I looked at the student and asked, “How would this be meaningful? How would it demonstrate your analysis and contain all the elements of the essay?”
Voices erupted from all over the room. And their energy made sense. This class was already invested in the book. When I began teaching Grendel—John Gardner’s philosophically dense retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s perspective—I wasn’t sure how the class would manage a story filled with allusions, metafiction, and an unreliable narrator. But every day they wanted to discuss the reading, drawn in by Grendel’s sardonic voice and the novel’s existential questions. Students called it “fan fiction,” a genre they could identify with, and by the time we reached the end, they were discussing daily how philosophy and meaning shaped Grendel’s choices.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if I invited students more fully into their own learning, and their deep engagement gave me an opening to try something I’d been wanting to explore: when students have ownership over the form of a rigorous assessment, can their analytical thinking deepen, if the academic expectations remain non-negotiable?
The Framework
“Let’s make a list on the board,” I said. “What would a video need to fulfill the assignment?”
We co-created a framework. In groups of no more than four, students would:
- Choose one of three philosophies we had discussed: nihilism, solipsism, or existentialism.
- Present an arguable thesis about its role in the novel.
- Support their argument with concrete textual evidence.
- Ask “Why does this matter?”
Once we agreed on the academic must-haves, the rest became a design problem. How they did this was up to them, as long as their analysis met the expectations. Before beginning, each group pitched its concept to me, outlining roles for each member and explaining its approach. Alongside the video, they also had to submit a written script capturing the full argument. I gave students the option of writing the traditional essay if they preferred. More than half chose the video.
I was nervous they would spend more time playing with video apps than synthesizing philosophy and literature. Would the freedom I gave them undermine academic rigor? The script requirement forced students to organize and articulate their thinking—not as scattered notes, but as an argument supported with evidence.
What Students Produced
The students approached the assignment with surprising seriousness and creativity. One group created a quiz show in which contestants debated Gardner’s philosophical intentions. Another student staged scenes with dolls, arguing about nihilism and solipsism. The formats were playful, and some were quite funny, but the work undergirding them was serious. Students had to sustain a claim, select evidence, and explain what the evidence meant.
What surprised me most was that the creative formats didn’t shorten the thinking; they expanded it. The scripts ran seven to eight pages—far longer than my original three-to-four-page essay requirement. Students were synthesizing, analyzing, and constructing arguments, but the medium allowed them to explore ideas in ways that didn’t feel like “school” to them. In one project examining existentialism, students wrote: “Gardner asks the reader to do the opposite of Grendel: To choose, act, and commit to something, even if you are unsure what the outcome will be. Risks and taking responsibility are necessary. Existentialism gives people freedom, but it also requires responsibility.”
They argued that Beowulf demonstrates how Grendel could give his life meaning through creation rather than destruction, even in a meaningless universe—a sophisticated philosophical claim.
I assessed the videos with the same rubric categories I use for essays: thesis clarity, textual evidence, depth of analysis, and the “so what?” On that rubric, the videos performed as strongly as the essays, and in some cases, students made more ambitious arguments than I typically see in an essay. Perhaps that was because they knew their peers would watch or because they had agency over their own product. Either way, groups pushed one another to strengthen both the video and the analysis.
What I Learned About Agency and Scaffolding
The key to this assignment’s success wasn’t simply giving students freedom; it was co-creating clear academic expectations within that freedom. By the time we began the project, students had participated in a Socratic seminar, discussed and written about the philosophies, and tracked Grendel’s character arc through the novel. They were ready.
Requiring the script prevented the project from devolving into “fun phone time.” However, watching the progress of this assignment showed me where I still needed to improve and tighten a student-driven assessment.
For example, verbal proposals did not sufficiently prepare the students to create. Some groups took too long getting started because their plans were exciting but vague. I should have required detailed written proposals that included specific roles and a preliminary thesis. Some students struggled to translate an essay argument into a visual form, so more explicit explanations and guidelines would have helped them with this challenge.
Elucidating the details and structure of a creative, student-driven assignment doesn’t restrict creativity. It provides guardrails and guidance so they can do their best work and still have agency over their product.
Building a Culture That Supports Intellectual Risk-Taking
As a pre-AP class, we can’t do this for every unit. Students still need traditional writing modes, and they need to learn the basic structures of academic argument on the page. But a project like this provides a break from the monotony and offers an outlet for student creativity. It also asks students to think metacognitively about what counts as evidence, analysis, and purpose—and to build a product that demonstrates their ideas.
This project succeeded because students were prepared, and because our classroom culture supports intellectual risk-taking. In classes with less intrinsic motivation, the same concept could still work, but it would require more structure: tighter checkpoints, smaller scope, more in-class planning time, and clearer templates. Students would still have agency, but I’d have to watch them more closely.
That day of groans and kvetching turned out to be a turning point. When my student asked, “What if we made videos?” he understood he was proposing a different format—not lower expectations. In the end, students made work they were genuinely proud of and devoted more time and thought to it than they typically would to an essay. As one student told me afterward, “This wasn’t my favorite book, but this was the best assignment ever.”