Syllabi & Lesson Plans

We welcome a new guest poster, Jess Worby, with this excellent lesson plan designed for older teens.  This spring, I taught comics to an 11th grade studio art class at LOMA, a public art high school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The students had already been taught life drawing, bookbinding, paper-making, and more. I based the…

A two-week comics course for teenagers, taught and written by Jessica Abel. Originally published as a blog series in 2012, compiled here as a single guide. Week 1, Day 1: Using comics to tell your story With this post, we inaugurate a fantastic new series by Derek Mainhart, a cartoonist and teacher of comics at…

(Or, How to Get Your Students to Hug You at the End of the Semester) As a male teacher, affection in the classroom is a tricky thing. I cannot as easily show my affection for my students as some of my female counterparts seem to so easily do. I cannot engage in conversations about their…

Here’s another thoughtful piece from our contributor Jarod Rosello. If you missed his first post for us, on using jam comics in a freshman comp class, you really shouldn’t; read it here. My classroom is not a particularly quiet space. It never has been. When I taught high school, the teachers in the rooms around mine…

Last year I got an e-mail from Alison Binney asking for permission to use some images from my book 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style for an article she was writing for an teachers’ publication. She recently sent me a copy of the booklet, Planning for Innovation in English Teaching, and I really…

DWWP is a 15-chapter book designed to accompany a typical university-level studio art class meeting three hours a week. However, if you are actually teaching a class like that, you will quickly realize that our book is quite generously overstuffed and there is almost no way you can touch on every single item in the…

This is a syllabus for a five-day intensive workshop that could meet for six hours a day over the course of a week or, alternately, over the course of five weeks. It would be too much to try and get through a multiple-page story in that time, so the focus here is on learning the…

This syllabus could easily be used for a 12-week class as well. It would probably be enough to add a few extra work days, but you could also add back in some of the lessons we cut here, such as 5.2, “Figuring out the figure 1” and 12.2, “Figuring out the figure 2,” or chapter…

This syllabus could easily be used for a 12-week class as well. It would probably be enough to add a few extra work days, but you could also add back in some of the lessons we cut here, such as 5.2, “Figuring out the figure 1” and 12.2, “Figuring out the figure 2,” or chapter…

Lecture/discussion. This is a section you’ll want to present verbally to your class, and allow for questions and answers. Review. This is a quick verbal overview of an idea by you. Lecture/demo. In this case, you’ll want to have materials on hand to show students the technique in question. You may want to demo the…

DWWP is a 15-chapter book designed to accompany a typical university-level studio art class meeting three hours a week. However, if you are actually teaching a class like that, you will quickly realize that our book is quite generously overstuffed and there is almost no way you can touch on every single item in the…