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ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, videos, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you.

Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals.

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Lesson Plan

Grades

9 - 12

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Estimated Time

Ten 50-minute sessions

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Featured Resources From Theory to Practice
OVERVIEW

Working in small groups, students use reciprocal teaching strategies as they read and discuss Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's memoir Night. Everyone in the classroom takes a turn assuming the "teacher" role, as the class works with four comprehension strategies: predicting, question generating, summarizing, and clarifying.
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FEATURED RESOURCES
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Reciprocal Teaching Guidelines: This printable resource outlines and describes the four types of questions students prepare during a reciprocal teaching activity.

Self-Reflection: Taking Part in a Group: Using this online tool, students describe their interactions during a group activity, as well as ways in which they can improve. Students can add rows and columns to the chart and print their finished work.

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Reciprocal teaching allows students to take more responsibility for their learning by participating in the classroom as equal partners with everyone, even the teacher. Rick VanDeWeghe describes reciprocal teaching as "a teacher and student or group of students read a portion of text and then take turns "teaching" that segment of text to one another. In the dialogue about the text, the "teacher" summarizes the content, generates questions about the content, clarifies, and predicts." (86). To focus class exploration, the discussion relies on four comprehension strategies: predicting, question generating, summarizing, and clarifying. This student-centered technique stimulates discussion and promotes interaction in the classroom community while reinforcing comprehension strategies that students can rely on when reading independently.

Further Reading
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VanDeWeghe, Rick. "Research Matters: What Kinds of Classroom Discussion Promote Reading Comprehension?" English Journal 96.3 (January 2007): 86-91.

Palincsar, A. S., & Brown, A. L. "Interactive Teaching to Promote Independent Learning from Text." The Reading Teacher 39.8 (April 1986): 771-777.

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Using Student-Centered Comprehension Strategies with Elie Wiesel's Night - ReadWriteThink

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ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, videos, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you. Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals.

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The Freedom Forum's mission is to foster First Amendment freedoms for all.

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The Nobel Acceptance Speech delivered
by Elie Wiesel in Oslo on December 10, 1986

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Chairman Aarvik, members of the Nobel Committee, ladies and gentlemen:

Words of gratitude. First to our common Creator. This is what the Jewish tradition commands us to do. At special occasions, one is duty-bound to recite the following prayer: "Barukh shehekhyanu vekiymanu vehigianu lazman haze" - "Blessed be Thou for having sustained us until this day."

Then -- thank you, Chairman Aarvik, for the depth of your eloquence. And for the generosity of your gesture. Thank you for building bridges between people and generations. Thank you, above all, for helping humankind make peace its most urgent and noble aspiration.

I am moved, deeply moved by your words, Chairman Aarvik. And it is with a profound sense of humility that I accept the honor - the highest there is - that you have chosen to bestow upon me. I know your choice transcends my person.

Do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? I do not. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions. And yet, I sense their presence. I always do - and at this moment more than ever. The presence of my parents, that of my little sister. The presence of my teachers, my friends, my companions...
This honor belongs to all the survivors and their children and, through us to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have always identified.

I remember: it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

I remember he asked his father: "Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?"

And now the boy is turning to me. "Tell me," he asks, "what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?" And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

And then I explain to him how naïve we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.

Of course, since I am a Jew profoundly rooted in my people's memory and tradition, my first response is to Jewish fears, Jewish needs, Jewish crises. For I belong to a traumatized generation, one that experienced the abandonment and solitude of our people. It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my own: Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jews in Arab land... But others are important to me. Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov's isolation is as much a disgrace as Joseph Begun's imprisonment and Ida Nudel's exile. As is the denial of solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa's right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela's interminable imprisonment.

There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our attention: victims of hunger, of racism and political persecution - in Chile, for instance, or in Ethiopia - writers and poets, prisoners in so many lands governed by the Left and by the Right.

Human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free. How can one not be sensitive to their plight? Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere. That applies also to Palestinians to whose plight I am sensitive but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence. Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers. They are frustrated, that is understandable, something must be done. The refugees and their misery. The children and their fear. The uprooted and their hopelessness. Something must be done about their situation. Both the Jewish people and the Palestinian people have lost too many sons and daughters and have shed too much blood. This must stop, and all attempts to stop it must be encouraged. Israel will cooperate, I am sure of that. I trust Israel for I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from their horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land. Please understand my deep and total commitment to Israel: if you could remember what I remember, you would understand. Israel is the only nation in the world whose existence is threatened. Should Israel lose but one war, it would mean her end and ours as well. But I have faith. Faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and even in His creation. Without it no action would be possible. And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all. Isn't that the meaning of Alfred Nobel's legacy? Wasn't his fear of war a shield against war?

There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person - a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Jr. - one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death.

As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude as one who has emerged from the Kingdom of Night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them.

Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

Thank you, Chairman Aarvik. Thank you, members of the Nobel Committee. Thank you, people of Norway, for declaring on this singular occasion that our survival has meaning for mankind.

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The Nobel Acceptance Speech delivered by Elie Wiesel in Oslo on December 10, 1986 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Chairman Aarvik, members of the Nobel Committee, ladies and gentlemen: Words of gratitude. First to our common Creator. This is what the Jewish tradition commands us to do.

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This interview appeared in the November 2000 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.

He's one of the people I most respect: Elie Wiesel. After I first read his memoir Night seven years ago, I was not the same-you can't be the same after hearing how Elie, at age 15, survived the horror of the Holocaust death camps. Through his eyes, we witness the depths of both human cruelty and human grace-and we're left grappling with what remains of Elie, a teenage boy caught between the two. I gain courage from his courage.

The story-and especially that number, six million-numbs us: A Jew hater named Adolf Hitler rises to power in Germany, the world goes to war in 1939, and when the showdown is over six years later, the tyrant has slaughtered six million Jews. Six million. Inconceivable. We see footage of the concentration camps, the gas chambers, the gallows.Yet words like Holocaust and Auschwitz are still abstractions-seemingly impossible until we see photos of someone who was there. A face. Eyes. Hair. Prison numbers tattooed into an arm. A real person like Elie Wiesel who, 55 years ago, made it through the atrocity.

"How could you live through the Holocaust and not be bitter?" I ask Elie. At 72, he emanates quiet strength; with his strong handgrip, it's as if he's saying, "I assure you-I am alive." We sit across from each other at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, where hundreds come to see evidence of what happened to the Jewish people. Thousands already know Elie Wiesel's name-he is a prolific writer, a professor at Boston University and an activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986-but I want him to take me back to the time when living to tell the story was the last thing that mattered to him. I wanted to know:

"What does it take to be normal again, after having your humanity stripped away by the Nazis?"

"What is abnormal is that I am normal," he says. "That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life-that is what is abnormal."

"Why didn't you go insane?"

"To this day," he says, "that is a mystery to me."

And a miracle. In 1944, during World War II, Elie, his parents, his three sisters-and his 15,000 Jewish neighbors in Sighet, Hungary-were captured by the Nazis, put into cattle cars and shipped off to concentration camps at Auschwitz, Buna, Birkenau and Buchenwald. Within an hour of walking through the gates of Auschwitz, Elie was separated from his mother and sisters-but he held close to his father. "I had one thought," Elie writes in his memoir Night. "Not to lose him. Not to be left alone." He wasn't. In the coming months, Elie and his father survived together- they witnessed the hangings, escaped the human ovens and endured the hatred of the Nazis. The horror of the camps was unreal. On his first night in Auschwitz, Elie saw German soldiers throwing Jewish babies into a fire, then pinched his face to be sure that he wasn't dreaming. "For a long time," he says, "I wondered, Did I see that? I sometimes doubt my own eyes. In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die."

And so began some hard questions for his God: "Where are you now? How can you let this happen?" In 1945, when he witnessed his father's death from dysentery and starvation, he questioned God's silence again-and he decided that he no longer wanted to live.

Yet he did, and in retrospect, he doesn't know why. After he was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, he and other orphans were sent to France. There, he lived in an orphanage, then later supported himself as a tutor and choir director-and he decided that he wanted to live again. He studied literature, philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne, and in 1952 he became a reporter for a newspaper in Tel Aviv. For ten years after his release, he vowed not to speak of his experience. "I wanted to be sure that the words I was going to use about this event were the proper words," he has said. With the publication of his memoir Night, which was translated from French to English in 1960, Elie finally broke his silence. He has since written more than 40 books.

You can't hear Elie's story without wondering: "Can he live through that kind of hate and not become a hater? Can he still be capable of love? Can he find any reason to be grateful?" When I talk with Elie about these things, he tells me that he has few answers and many, many questions-yet even in his questions, I hear hope that the human spirit can survive anything. Anything.

In our time together, Elie and I talk about how it is possible that he can still believe in the sovereignty of a force bigger than himself, why he has no explanation for his survival in the death camps, and what, five decades after Auschwitz, brings him what he calls real joy.

Start reading Oprah's interview with Elie Wiesel

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This interview appeared in the November 2000 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. He's one of the people I most respect: Elie Wiesel. After I first read his memoir Night seven years ago, I was not the same-you can't be the same after hearing how Elie, at age 15, survived the horror of the Holocaust death camps.

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The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivor History - Remember.org

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The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivor History - Remember.org

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The Holocaust history through survivor stories at Remember.org, an educational forum with art,, photos, and more to promote learning and remembering.