If you are anything like me, the first question I generally ask students after we finish reading a text is, ‘what was the theme?’ I find that students need some support at the middle/high school level with crafting a great theme statement as they tend to want to identify the theme topic, instead of the message that goes with that topic. They might suggest that the theme of To Kill a Mockingbird is social injustice, but what I am looking for is that full sentence message about social injustice.  

Where my students really struggled, however, was in the analysis of that theme statement. The found it very difficult to trace the development of the theme over the course of a text. Discussing how the author developed that theme stumped many of my students. They searched endlessly and haphazardly to find meaningful evidence from the text. It was through their challenges that my approach to teaching theme changed. Instead of finishing the text and then asking this question, I began asking this question before we even started reading.