Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” – 20 Common Core Learning Tasks!!

This Common Core resource includes 20 rigorous unit learning tasks for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, "Young Goodman Brown." The teacher-created learning tasks include standard(s) alignment using the language of Common Core State Standards. The unit activities represent a balance of analysis and evaluation activities focusing on a variety of literary elements, constructed responses, and extended informational/explanatory and argumentative writing. This resource also includes some embedded external documents and informational texts that have thematic parallels with "Young Goodman Brown." The learning tasks will delve deeper into the complex character development, figurative and connotative meanings, point of view, and themes that have made it a literary classic.

Critical reading of literary texts is a critical component of the Common Core State Standards, and analyzing texts is a key skill that students will need for college and the jobs of the future. The critical foci of the learning tasks include:


1. Figurative and connotative meanings
2. Citing strong and thorough textual evidence (inferencing)
3. Analyzing themes and their development over the course of the text.
4. Analyzing complex character development
5. Responding to literature using constructed responses and extended writing.
6. Collegial discussions and presenting information.
7. Symbolism, allegory, and irony
8. Plot structure including predictions and suspense
9. Morphology and context clues
10. Analyzing a theme between a written and visual medium
11. Reading and analyzing informational texts
12. Analyzing points of view and their impact on the understanding of the text.



Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” – 20 Common Core Learning Tasks!! by Dr. Joel C. Boyce is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.