BEST CLASS EVER with Ali Morris

There’s a moment near the end of every Bible-as-Literature unit when the energy drops. Your students made it through Eden, the Flood, the binding of Isaac, and the Joseph cycle. They’ve discussed sibling rivalry and forgiveness. They’ve debated whether Genesis 50:20 is a satisfying ending. And then comes the awkward week where you need a final project — and you’re already exhausted.

I taught this unit five years before I figured out a capstone that actually worked. Here’s what changed.

The problem with most “end of unit” projects

The traditional approach is some version of: “write a 5-paragraph essay analyzing a theme in Genesis.” It’s not wrong. It’s just exhausting — for them and for you. Your strongest writers cruise through it. Your struggling readers freeze. And the project lives and dies inside the classroom — there’s no reason it should matter to a 16-year-old in 2026.

What I needed was a project that:

• Let students choose, so they cared
• Connected Genesis to art, music, and film they actually consume
• Had real format options for kids who don’t write well
• Could be graded with a simple rubric (because I was tired)

Strategy 1: Let students pick their own Genesis story

The first move that changed everything was handing students a menu of stories instead of assigning one. Eden. Cain and Abel. The Flood. Babel. The Akedah. Jacob’s ladder. Joseph’s coat. Pharaoh’s dreams. The reunion in Egypt.

When students choose, they invest. The kid who lit up during Cain and Abel might not care about Joseph — and that’s fine. They go where the story already grabbed them.

Strategy 2: Make them trace the story’s afterlife

Here’s where Bible-as-Literature actually starts to click for students. These stories didn’t stop at the page. The Akedah is in Caravaggio paintings, in Wilfred Owen’s WWI poetry, in Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” Eden is in Paradise Lost, in C.S. Lewis, in Mad Men‘s opening titles. Joseph’s coat is in Andrew Lloyd Webber and on every middle-grade book cover that wants to scream “favorite child.”

Have students find one literary retelling (a poem, novel, or short story) and one cross-medium retelling (a painting, film, song, podcast, or video game). They start to see Genesis the way a literature scholar does — not as a religious document but as the source code for a huge chunk of Western art.

This is the moment I’ve watched students stop slumping in their seats. They pull out their phones. They send each other songs. They argue about whether the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man counts as a Job retelling (it does).

Strategy 3: Give them creative format choices

The biggest unlock was letting students retell the story in any format they wanted. Not “write a 3-page modern adaptation.” Eight options: short story, song, poem, comic, screenplay, podcast, visual essay, or graphic novel page.

Suddenly the kid who had nothing to say all unit is writing a song from Hagar’s perspective. The kid who can’t write a paragraph is making a four-panel comic about the Tower of Babel. The kid who lives on TikTok is scripting a 90-second video about the Joseph coat.

Same learning. Same standards. Different paths.

Strategy 4: A reflection essay that’s actually short

After the creative piece, I have students write a one-page reflection: Why this story? What did you notice when you compared retellings? What did your version add? That’s it. Not 5 paragraphs. Not 1500 words. One honest page. That’s where the real thinking shows up.

Strategy 5: A simple 4-category rubric

I score four things: Choice & Justification, Cross-Medium Analysis, Original Retelling, Reflection. Four points each. Sixteen total. I can grade a class set in an hour and a half. The rubric is plain language. Students know what they’re being graded on. No surprises.

A free guide that does the work for you

I built all of this — story menu, step-by-step pages, format options, rubric — into a free 10-page capstone guide. You can grab it in my TpT store. Print it, hand it out, and your culminating project is done.

Download the free Genesis Cultural Afterlives Capstone Project →

It pairs naturally with my Bible-as-Literature trio (Books I, II, and III), but it works as a standalone with any Genesis unit you already teach.

One last thing

The point of teaching Genesis as literature isn’t to convert anyone to anything. It’s to show students that some stories — written down 3,000 years ago in a language most of them will never learn — are still being told, still being argued with, still being made into songs and paintings and films. The capstone is where that becomes real to them. It’s the project I wish I’d had my first year teaching.

Hope it saves you some Sunday-night planning.

— Ali