Teaching The Great Gatsby: Discussion Questions, Unit Plan Ideas, and Historical Context

Just about every American Literature class in the country will read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel on the American Dream, but that doesn’t mean that your lesson plans on Gatsby should be like all the others.  It’s one thing to fulfill a requirement or simply “cover” the book and it’s quite another to teach an impactful unit on The Great Gatsby that will really make a difference in the way your students view their world.  

II first started teaching this novel in my American Literature classes back in the early 2000s, and it was always one of my favorite units of the year.

Here are my top seven tips for teaching a unit on Gatsby that will stick with your students for years.

Get your students excited to start the novel.  Nothing makes a novel unit go smoothly quite like students who are eager to read the book.  So it’s worth it to take a day or two to get your classes anticipating the book and its themes.  My favorite way to get my students excited to read Gatsby is by getting them thinking about the bigger ideas in a fun, laid-back way.  We play a game, do some writing, and watch and discuss a compelling TED Talk about how money makes people mean—and all of a sudden they are already considering the themes of the novel.

Make sure students actually read the book.  If your classes simply listen to your interpretations of the novel without reading it themselves, all the planning in the world won’t help them remember your unit.  The best ways that I have found to guarantee that my classes interact with the words on the page is to give daily reading quizzes on the homework with questions that I’ve checked against the most popular online summaries.  It might take a little extra work at first, but once students get into the story and realize how much they enjoy actually reading the book, they are usually happy to keep reading for themselves.  And then to make sure they’re really grappling with the text and not just skimming for plot, I use close reading questions for each chapter that help students notice important details in Fitzgerald’s language, themes, and structure.

Enjoy the suspenseful plot together.  One of the main reasons why Fitzgerald’s work endures is because The Great Gatsby is such a compelling story.  Just enjoying the mystery with your students as they read it for the first time will go a long way towards helping them remember the book.  So play up the questions and drama surrounding Gatsby and his past—students will get more out of the experience when they have fun reading.

Get students writing about the text early and often. I suggest starting each day with a bellringer freewrite prompt. These short writing exercises prime students to think about the essential questions of the novel before they even open the book.  For example, before I ask them to consider how World War I might have affected Nick, I’ll have them write on a question like “How do you think war affects people? How might someone change as a result of fighting in a war?” I also have students write reading responses based on the text as well as short essays in quizzes and tests.  The more students write about this classic text, the more they refine their own views on important questions, and the more memorable and personal their experience with the novel will be. 

Help your classes to experience the historical context. Getting students to appreciate the historical context of a book doesn’t mean lecturing them on dates and important figures or making them sit through videos about stocks and bonds.  Instead, get your classes to experience the music, art, and film from the period first hand.  Even after the facts of the story have faded from their memory, they’ll still recall the time they listened to an old version of “The Sheik of Araby” in class or that two-minute video on cars in the 20s or the compelling video they watched about real-life gangster Arnold Rothstein.  

Add diverse voices to the discussion. Gatsby is one of my all-time favorite novels, and yet its author was definitely biased on many issues of class, race, and gender.  And so it is essential to include more marginalized views and voices in your unit.  I have found great success in including the film “Hoop Dreams” in my American Dream unit.  Similarly, poems such as “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes,  “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, or “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar help students to come at the essential questions of the novel from multiple viewpoints.

Help your students discover why this classic novel is relevant to their lives today.  Once your classes start thinking about some of the essential questions that Fitzgerald asks in his novel, they’ll realize how much they have in common with the characters in the story.  Getting your students to discuss and write about why we lie to ourselves and others, what role deception plays in romantic relationships, or why it is important to have dreams, will help create a truly memorable Gatsby unit. After the party scene in Chapter 2, for example, I ask students, “Why does Nick feel like both an insider and an outsider at the party?” At first students think it’s a basic question, but the conversation quickly deepens. This is one of the first moments when students begin to see how Nick’s personality, his position between social classes, and even his sexuality shape the way he observes the world around him. When you incorporate TED Talks, compelling radio reporting, and other contemporary resources in your lesson plans, students will see how we are all still struggling to find answers to these essential questions. 

After years of teaching the novel and really getting to know it from the inside, I finally had the time—once I was out of the classroom—to turn those ideas into the complete unit it always deserved–with daily writing prompts, chapter discussion questions, close reading activities, and a pacing guide that makes the entire novel easy to plan and teach.

And when you’ve taught a Gatsby unit that has students pondering its big questions years later—or even remembering how excited they were to discover Gatsby’s secrets—you’ll know you’ve done this classic novel justice.