Using informational text (and technology!) to help our students make sense of this strange time

Many of us are feeling fairly Zoomed out these days, but there are still those worthwhile virtual meet-ups that rejuvenate our spirits and spark new ideas. Our conversation this week about using informational texts to help our students and ourselves make sense of this strange time was definitely one of those worthy gatherings.

Our conversation focused on four primary themes/takeaways: 1) focusing on purpose and relevance; 2) fostering student engagement; 3) keeping things simple; and 4) being mindful about the difference between online and offline reading.

We started our conversation by talking about a documentary, “Most Dangerous Ways to School: Nicaragua,” that one of our participants was using with her 9^th grade English students. Susan asked the teacher how she planned to assess student engagement while they watched the documentary. She said she had already received some informal responses from students about the video, but she was still thinking about what kind of writing to ask the students to produce after viewing. Susan asked what she wanted students to come away with after watching the video. The teacher responded that she wanted them to gain a greater perspective about the kinds of hardships some students around the world face in just getting to school everyday and possibly to compare those conditions to their own, either during the coronavirus quarantine or in general. Susan agreed that a comparative personal narrative, perhaps drawing upon 2-3 specific details from the video made sense. She stressed that during this time it is especially important to focus on purpose and relevance and to streamline assignments and assessments based on what is most essential as we close out this strange school year.

Susan also asked the teacher if she planned to use any tools like edPuzzle or Flipgrid that would facilitate student responses to and engagement with the video. This is where we were especially grateful that our friend Michele Haiken had joined us. She explained the different uses of the two tools: edPuzzle works well with short videos and embeds questions during the videos, while FlipGrid gives students the opportunity to respond via video.

Susan shared an edPuzzle Audrey had created for their unit on consent connected to Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak. The edPuzzle featured several multiple-choice questions embedded in the short, animated video about understanding consent.

Michele then shared her screen to show us how she recently used Flipgrid to get students to respond to a multimedia unit she had built around The Diary of Anne Frank , which included 1) reading book, 2) reading or seeing the play, 3), taking a virtual tour of the Secret Annex (through the Anne Frank Museum), and possibly perusing related material on Google Arts and Culture. Her prompt for all this was quite simple: How can we take inspiration from Anne Frank during this time of isolation?

Michele also talked about using a weekly video to lay out instructions and goals for the week. And she is using Anchor to record herself reading aloud for students in a private podcast, a nice tool that brings her presence into her students’ worlds while also ensuring all students at least auditory access to the text.

Audrey then shared how she has used Perusall, a social annotation tool, to foster engagement among her college students as they navigate reading in isolation without as much classroom support. With Perusall, the instructor can add specific questions for response or the students can simply annotate on their own. The nice aspect of this tool is that it allows students to participate in a community conversation as they are reading. They can indicate questions (and upvote questions they share) and they can respond to or upvote responses they find useful. Responses can also include images and links. There’s even a computer-generated grading tool, so that instructors can assign a score to the annotation work, and easy analytics to note who is responding frequently and substantively.

Despite our excitement about the many tools available, especially right now, we all agreed that keeping things simple is the best course of action for both our students and ourselves. For Michele, this means using the same four tools. For Susan, this meant going back to GoogleDocs to create a guided reading template for a recent New York Times editorial about leadership in a crisis (which you are welcome to copy and use!) that could be shared with students so that they could add responses to the reading prompts and/or annotations via comment, which their classmates could also see and add to (similar to what Audrey did with Perusall).

Susan also mentioned a conversation she had recently with a teacher about a Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby unit. She explained that she encouraged the teacher to think about her purpose, given the rapidly approaching end of the school year, and streamline the unit according to her instructional goals. For instance, instead of having the whole class read both articles in the unit, she could assign one to half the class and have them read and discuss it in a breakout room on Zoom or GoogleMeet and then have them present their article to the class.

Michele, however, cautioned that we need to be mindful about the difference between reading in print and online and that we need to tailor our expectations for reading during remote learning. She advocated presenting smaller chunks of reading and streamlining reading assignments overall.

In response, Audrey echoed Michele (and the Anne Frank unit) in noting the importance of giving students a variety of choices and not (inadvertently or otherwise) shutting down options students might want to pursue about a topic, whether it be producing a creative response or following up on a particular aspect of a subject, through links or multimedia.

As should be evident from the above, we had a great time during this inspiring and energizing conversation. Our only regret is that we didn’t quite have enough people to do our beloved vocab skits, which we think would be easy and fun to do using the breakout rooms in Zoom. If you and a few of your colleagues and/or teacher friends would like to schedule such a conversation with us either before the end of the school year, or over the summer, please feel free to reach out to us at usinginfotext at gmail.com.

Stay well, everyone!

Let's Chat About Using Informational Text During Remote Learning and Beyond!

We hope this finds you and your students as well as can be during this strange time. As educators, the set of dynamics and concerns that we are normally in the midst of, especially as we near the finish of a school year, has shifted dramatically. As always we want to care for and support our students while also challenging them to expand their knowledge and develop their skills; however, this global pause brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic has caused us all to question what that means and what it looks like, or should look like, both now and whenever we might return to our non-virtual classrooms and school buildings.

As you likely have over the last several weeks, we have been trying out new tools that enable us to keep doing what we’ve done in the past, and some that have enabled new forms of interaction and learning. It’s great that so many tools and platforms are being offered for free to educators and students right now, but it also creates option anxiety, and who needs anything else to be anxious about right now?

What has grounded us professionally, as well as personally, in the last several weeks has been the virtual conversations we’ve had with colleagues near and far, to share strategies and common concerns, and of course, to offer moral support. So, we’d like to do the same with our Using Informational Text friends.

Informational text certainly has an important place in making sense of this time, and especially when used to help students make connections with literature that depicts other times, places, and peoples experiencing their own cataclysms and everyday lives. So, let’s get together and talk about how to do this work at this time and in whatever the future may hold for teaching and learning.

Please join us on one of the following dates/times (click on the link to register):

Wednesday, May 13, 7-8pm EDT

Thursday, May 14, 4-5pm EDT

Monday, May 18, 3-4pm EDT

Click on the link(s) above to RSVP for your preferred date/time; you will receive the Zoom invitation upon approval of your registration.

Our approach to using informational text has always been about building relevance and engagement. So, the underlying question of our discussion will be: What makes sense now? What is our purpose? We will share ideas about text pairings in our current climate, including strategies for leading a whole-class or small group discussion of a reading via videoconference and ideas for how to use informational text, including media links, to foster engagement and community.

We’d also be happy to join you and your students via whatever remote platform works for you to read and discuss an informational text with you. This moment is particularly conducive to remote guest appearances! Let us know what and when might work for you. Reach out to us via Twitter @usinginfotext or email.

Guest blog: The Merging of Media in the English Classroom -- A Summertime Reflection

Today, we welcome a guest blog from New Jersey English and journalism teacher Stacy Gerst:

Admittedly, the curriculum for the British literature course I teach follows an incredibly scripted framework: a chronological, historical approach to the traditional literary works that serve as the building blocks of the traditional literary canon. The problem? I’m not working with the “traditional” students that my predecessors had in mind when crafting this curriculum. And the department is not ready to update it yet. Consequently, the struggle is “more-than-real” as my colleagues and I try to overcome the roadblocks that exist in our relentless pursuit of the profession’s elusive Holy Grail: student engagement. 

From its origins in the Anglo-Saxon period, works from historic gems such as The Exeter Book lack appeal to the average student who struggles to connect to literature in meaningful ways. The lamentations of the poem speakers, often mourning their cold, difficult existence at sea and the daunting conditions that threaten survival, often fall on deaf ears. Put off by the external trappings of Anglo-Saxon life, many students close themselves off to engagement and stop short of exploring some of the broader concepts that transcend time or space, such as the impact that exile has on the human condition. 

Back in 2015, I came across a story on my USA Today app that caught my attention with the following headline: “More than a decade after release, they all come back.” The multi-chapter story, written by Kevin Johnson, follows the plight of Silvestre Sergovia and the impact that solitary confinement has on him and other prisoners. Since 2015, political attitudes toward this practice has shifted greatly, especially when the Obama administration took a firm stance against its use with juveniles. Awareness has served as a catalyst for positive change. This was obviously an issue that mattered, but how could I integrate this into my instruction in a meaningful and relevant way?

It is at this juncture of pedagogical dilemma and innovative thinking that I could apply the theory and work that Fisch and Chenelle laid out in Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text (2016). During a session led by the pair at the NJCTE Fall 2018 conference, they challenged attendees to rethink their approach to the canon and revitalize it for contemporary audiences by linking them to relevant informational texts. The key to this lies in the use of non-fiction, an element that advocates of practical learning as well as the Common Core hold in highest regard (and rightly so!). 

After studying “The Seafarer,” “The Wanderer,” and “The Wife’s Lament” from our textbook, I assigned the Johnson article to students along with several straightforward reading comprehension questions. The article lent itself well to this because 1.) it was long enough to challenge their stamina and 2.) was complex enough that they had to do more than just skim. This is increasingly an issue with my students; very few, if any, fully read a text when they can take a shortcut. I attribute this in part to the efficiency of search engines to “cache” information in articles for them or using Ctrl + F (Windows) or ⌘ Command + F (Mac). (Of course, the impact of technology, media, and screen stimuli on attention spans play a role, but that’s a blog post for another day.) 

But how could I lead students to make the thematic connection between the two? I posed the following to students for a more extended written reflection:

In the conclusion to the piece, Kevin Johnson writes, “Segovia, meanwhile, believes he has the strength to defeat the demons of isolation and make it to the other side, where he intends to remain this time.”

Explain how “the demons of isolation” affect both Segovia and the speakers of the Anglo-Saxon exile poetry. Use textual evidence from the article and the poems to back up your claims.

I needed the comprehension questions to get my students to this point. The class discussion that followed revealed the dilemma that many students felt regarding crime, punishment, the criminal justice system, and the conditions inside US prisons. Several acknowledged that it was not as clear-cut as they once thought it was. 

One student response offered a personal anecdote: his uncle spent several years in prison, and his personality had changed profoundly as a result. “He isn’t the same person.”  Regrettably, the change was not in the vein of “He realized his issues, worked on them, and came out better.” Instead, his uncle was incredibly distant, struggled to connect to family, and didn’t function very well in his community. As the rest of the class listened to this, I could observe a greater sense of empathy in their responses to this raw (and rare) moment of exposure. Here was their friend, who trusted the group enough to share this intimate story about a person he cared about, who was impacted by this issue, who was impacted by exile, the same feeling explored by the Anglo-Saxon poets many years before. 

Lessons such as these are the ones that leave a lasting impact on students when they leave our classrooms. 

Based on the success I experienced with Chenelle and Fisch’s approach, I was inspired to integrate another literary work, Les Miserables, to expand upon this theme and social issue. Although the work was French, I felt confident that no one would argue with exposing students to another established canonical work. For the sake of time and student engagement, I used the 1998 film, directed by Billie August, and, on the whole, my classes found the story riveting, emotional, and captivating (just as readers and audiences have for years). But again: how could I integrate informational text and content to engage students and connect them to relevant social issues? 

One of the pivotal questions explored in Hugo’s story is whether or not “reform is a discredited fantasy” as Javert claims in the film. Here again, my news media consumption worked to my advantage when a 2017 news article about Shaka Senghor came to mind.  Sengor (whose 2017 memoir Writing My Wrongs: Live and Redemption in an American Prison I have since read and recommend) explores prison life and the parole system in a way that parallels Valjean’s experience in Les Miserables. I created comprehension questions for students to answer in response to the news article as well as Sengor’s 2014 TED Talk titled, “Why your worst deeds don’t define you.” The integration of both informational text and video media was especially effective for instruction. 

Just as before, the goal was to have students make connections between multiple works. I include a few examples below:

• One similarity between Victor Hugo’s character Jean Valjean and Shaka Senghor is that both experienced a “transformative” moment. Discuss what it was for each of them and what impact it had on them.

• While Valjean was able to redeem himself for his past misdeeds, Fantine was not. Hugo uses this to highlight another social issue: the treatment of women at this time. In what ways was she “held hostage to her past”? 

• According to Senghor, in the article, how do laws regarding parole make it challenging for released prisoners to start over? How was this true for Valjean in Les Miserables?

I will continue on this journey to create a more engaging curriculum that connects those in my classroom to contemporary issues while getting exposure to the classics. This, perhaps, is the most practical approach I’ve encountered so far and thank Susan and Audrey for sharing their findings and ideas with others in our profession.

Interactive timeline tracks changing views of Gatsby

We recently tweeted about a very interesting interactive timeline about The Great Gatsby, created by Andrew Newman, associate professor of English and History at Stony Brook University, but we wanted to write a brief blog to call more attention to his excellent work.

His interactive timeline allows readers to consider the ways in which “the frames of reference, or `horizons of understanding’” for Fitzgerald’s novel have changed over time.

Newman’s critical point, which he also articulates in “`Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’: The Great Gatsby in the 1980s” (published in Changing English, and linked to - outside the journal paywall - at the end of Newman’s timeline), is that while the text of Gatsby has remained unchanged, what it “has meant to generations of readers” and how that meaning has been shaped “by these readers’ own individual and collective experiences” is a fascinating lens through which to examine this still nearly ubiquitous novel.

Newman’s approach builds on the work of foundational literary scholars of reception theory like Jane Tompkins, who, for example, discovers that while Nathanial Hawthorne seemingly remained a constant in the literary canon, his position there is not a testament to the idea that his classic work has withstood the test of time and transcends the “limitations of its age.” Tompkins discovers, for example, that The Scarlett Letter is considered a great novel at different points in time, but that at each moment, “it is great for different reasons.” An “enduring work of American literature is not a stable object possessing features of enduring value” but a text that “because of its place within institutional and cultural history” has come to be valued as excellent, but excellent for different reasons at different moments in time.

Using an approach grounded in reception theory, Newman examines curriculum guides, classroom editions, and articles in pedagogy journals. He considers, moreover, how students reading the novel in the context of the 1974 film adaptation. starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, may have been influenced by its interpretation. How is our students’ understanding of the novel today shaped by the vision of Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film?

One favorite moment in his piece is when he discusses a quote in The New York Times by Robin Leach of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Leach remarks, “there’s more fascination with a Gatsby in a depression, when no one’s rich, than in a time when everyone’s rich.” As Newman notes, Leach is “wrong”: “there was no interest in Gatsby during the Great Depression; it became popular during the post-war era, when there was an increasing proportion of stakeholders in the American Dream.”

Indeed. What a brilliant reminder that the texts we read are not timeless, enduring classics that have always been and always will be read and valued by readers everywhere! No!

That said, given that we are, as Newman notes, approaching the kind of inequality of the 20s, in which the American Dream seems less and less powerful as a foundational myth of America, will Gatsby retain its popularity? Will we, English teachers, students, and readers, abandon Gatsby at this historical moment? Or will this text emerge as an “excellent,” “enduring” novel because of its ability to speak to the concerns of our current moment: xenophobia, anti-immigrant fervor, and anxiety over the decline of white male power?

Regardless, Newman’s research into the frames of references by which Gatsby’s readers have over time made sense out of Fitzgerald’s novel is such a valuable way for us to allow our students to demystify and deconstruct the status and stability of Gatsby as a cultural object.

Revamp your Lord of the Flies unit with Prasad's Damselfly

If you are teaching William Golding’s Lord of the Flies this year, consider including Chandra Prasad’s debut YA novel Damselfly as one of the texts in your unit. Yes, we usually talk about using informational text to teach literature, but at the heart of our work is putting texts in dialogue and asking what voices or perspectives are missing from canonical works and common interpretations of them.

In our volume on cross-disciplinary collaboration, we present a unit based on an excerpt from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and a New York Times science article on the study of aggression in male fruit flies. Our goal with that unit is to support students in using scientific knowledge to critically evaluate what Golding depicts in his novel and to develop their understanding of aggression and violence in the present day.

That said, like many other readers, we have some issues with Lord of the Flies, particularly its exclusive focus on very privileged white English boys. Indeed, when we wrote about the abovementioned texts in a piece for the New York Times Learning Network, we included links to additional pieces on bullying and aggression among girls that teachers and students could use to expand their discussion of such timely themes.

Prasad’s Damselfly is an engaging present-day take on Golding’s premise, particularly because it eschews the easy artifice of switching the gender of a single-sex group of teens stranded on a remote island in the Pacific to female (as an upcoming and already widely criticized film adaptation of Lord of the Flies – written and directed by two men – is planned to do – and as Libba Bray’s YA novel Beauty Queens more imaginatively has done).

Instead Damselfly intersects with and updates Golding’s plot, presenting a mixed-gender, mixed-race, yet still privileged 21^st-century group of American teenagers, the members of an elite private school’s fencing team, who had been on their way to a tournament in Japan when their plane crashed. After washing up on various parts of the island (implied to be the same island Golding’s boys crashed on), the survivors work together to build and acquire what they need to survive, but the social dynamics of their previous life and threats from an unseen fellow inhabitant of the island start to unravel their initially united resolve.  

Prasad’s novel is in some ways more engaging than Golding’s because she complicates the relationships between the teens by providing more backstory about them, particularly the Indian-American narrator Samantha and her best friend Mel, who is white. While Samantha attends the elite Drake Rosemont and even plays on its fencing team, she does so only via a scholarship she won partly to help diversify the school’s student body, after applying to the boarding school to escape the dysfunction and abuse at home that she hides even from Mel.

While readers might expect a battle of the sexes to be the primary source of conflict among the group, the most significant tensions fall along lines of race and class. That said, timeless teenage anxieties over popularity, peer pressure, and attractiveness are definitely at play in the conflicts that underscore this engaging novel. But one of the most affecting aspects of Damselfly is an update Prasad makes to the Lord of the Flies character Simon in Anne Marie whose survival struggle on the island is also dramatically complicated by mental illness.

As these power struggles play out, Prasad’s characters express ideas and opinions about each other that will provide ample fuel for students’ discussions about race, gender, class, disability, and how these identities and differences factor into the dynamics of their own families and communities, as well as our society as a whole.

Teachers could incorporate Damselfly into a Lord of the Flies unit in a variety of ways. Excerpts from corresponding parts of each novel could be placed in direct dialogue with each other. Or, after a teacher-led study of Lord of the Flies, groups of students could take the lead in teaching Damselfly, Beauty Queens or one of the film adaptations of Golding’s novel and then critically comparing each version.

Adding something into our curriculum often sparks anxiety about having enough time. But creating a cluster of texts around a canonical work that you love or that you are required to teach can reinvigorate both teacher and student interest in a novel like Lord of the Flies and create a rich learning experience about timely themes that warrants and produces extended discussion and exploration.

A little summer Gatsby reading: Corrigan's So We Read On

If you teach The Great Gatsby, put Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On onto your summer reading list. It’s chatty and fun, full of all sorts of tidbits and details about Fitzgerald, sources and context for the novel, the initial publication and reception of the text, and the ways in which Gatsby made it into the literary canon and our many classrooms.

This is a compelling and refreshing read, not a stuffy academic treatise; Corrigan is thoroughly honest and highly engaging about her own relationship to Gatsby. She writes in the very first paragraph about how, as a high-school senior, she thought it “was a boring novel about rich people” (3). Susan didn’t fully appreciate Gatsby until college after being roundly unimpressed by it in high school, and Audrey still sometimes finds Fitzgerald’s text a frustratingly claustrophobic examination of a narrow slice of society.

So We Read On is that rare and charming combination: both scholarly and totally fan-girly in its adult enthusiasm for Gatsby. Corrigan gushes that The Great Gatsby is “the Great American Novel, if there is such an animal” (8) and “as perfect as a novel can be” (9). And she worries about how students are and are not reading Fitzgerald’s work: “It’s not the green light, stupid; it’s Gatsby’s reaching for it that’s the crucial all-American symbol of the novel” (5).

This latter comment, of course, is in alignment with our visions. Like Corrigan, we think students need to be thinking about big ideas and essential questions when they read literature, and our volumes on using informational text, including our latest on Gatsby, are designed to help teachers guide their students away from the small questions about the green light and onto the bigger questions about what all these symbols – the green light, the mongrel dog, the gray child – illustrate about the vision of America and American possibility offered by and thwarted within the novel.

What is probably most infectious about Corrigan’s volume is her humility as an always-eager reader and thinker about Gatsby. For example, despite the fact that she has taught Gatsby at Georgetown year after year, Corrigan describes asking a group of students at her alma mater high school in Queens about why Daisy cries when she sees Gatsby’s pile of shirts. Corrigan admits, “I often ask classes that question because I’m never sure what that scene means” (293). And then she writes, with admiration of the answer a student offers:

A dark-haired girl raises her hand and says something I’ve never thought of: “She cries because she sees that Gatsby is just like Tom now. The poor boy she loved is gone. He’s rich like Tom, so he’s changed.” Her comment stops class discussion in its tracks for a few minutes because it feels so emotionally smart. I’ve never thought of Gatsby “becoming” like Tom. I’m not sure if she’s right but I love that this novel, like all great novels, spawns endless sharp interpretation. (293)

So read Corrigan this summer, if you haven’t already, and embrace some of the tantalizing ideas and writing and discussion prompts her text offers. Here are just four that we gleaned:

1. “The Great Gatsby is America’s greatest novel about class. In fact, it’s the only one of its canonical peers (Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Invisible Man, Beloved) that foregrounds class instead of race” (16). Do you agree? How do the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and racist moments in Gatsby connect with its broader narrative of class?

2. Corrigan describes giving a “contrarian talk” with the title “The Great Gatsby: Just How American Is This Great American Novel?” What do you think she means? In what ways, for you, is this novel distinctly American? What narrative of America does it offer? How compelling is that narrative in our current historical moment?

3. Corrigan tells us that Fitzgerald struggled with the title and when the novel was in production called it “Trimalchio,” after a character in the first-century Roman work Satyricon, by Petronius. She explains that Trimalchio “is a freed slave who’s climbed up the ladder of Roman society through hard work” (201). What do you think of “Trimalchio” as a title instead of Gatsby? Corrigan also informs us that Fitzgerald wasn’t “fond of `The Great Gatsby’ because he said that Gatsby wasn’t really great” (201). Do you think Fitzgerald was right to be skeptical about the title of his novel? Do you agree with Fitzgerald that Gatsby isn’t really great? Why or why not? Can you think of a better title?

4. Corrigan writes that Fitzgerald was “aiming for a big statement about America” (300). She notes that “So many immigrants had poured into America via New York City by the early 1920s. . . . Fitzgerald was a man of his time; he was nervous about those alien hordes, but he also understood their yearning. Could America deliver on its promises?” (301). What answer do you think Fitzgerald offers to this question at the end of Gatsby? Do you see echoes today in Gatsby’s nervousness about “alien hordes”? Do you think America today is delivering on its promises?

The importance of teaching students to read against canonical texts like Mockingbird

Periodically, on NCTE’s Connected Community, in our hallways, at conferences, and sometimes in our classrooms, we have one persistent and difficult conversation. How do we balance teaching canonical literature on the one hand and offering our students, on the other hand, what Latrise Johnson describes as “texts that include diverse characters but also . . . are reflective of students’ rich and complex histories”? This debate seems to surface, in particular, around To Kill a Mockingbird. Most recently, Will Menarndt argues in “Forget Atticus” that we should stop teaching TKAM.

Mockingbird has a long history of being lauded; Oprah has called it “our national book” and recent research suggests that many (white) teachers use TKAM to address multicultural issues, particularly race and racism (Macaluso 280). Depending on how that work is done with TKAM, particularly if we are spending the majority of our time highlighting the “obvious and overt racism” (Macaluso 282) in Harper Lee’s novel, we may be in danger of telling what Chimamanda Adichie warns against: the single story. Obvious and overt racism have been and remain only part of the complex story of racism. Students need to deepen their understanding of the institutional and structural racism that pervades Maycomb – in its housing, schools, and employment opportunities. The issues that Tom Robinson encounters with Maycomb’s justice system, like the lynch mob, are just the tip of the iceberg.

TKAM can be taught fruitfully in relation to that broader story of racism, and many teachers, before and after the publication of Go Set a Watchman, were doing that important work: complicating and troubling the dominant narrative of Atticus as the white savior and Tom as the voiceless, crippled, black victim. Michael Macaluso offers a thoughtful example of that work in his discussion of the lynch mob scene at the jailhouse. Reading against TKAM, for Macaluso, offers students the opportunity to see Atticus’s racism, even in this moment of defense of Tom Robinson, as “evidence of how racism works through privilege . . . and how it is laced into institutional and cultural practices and behaviors” (285).

This practice of reading against the text, particularly when the text is a canonical staple and as such has been central to reifying our dominant ideologies, is what Carlin Borsheim-Black, Macaluso, and Robert Petrone call critical literacy pedagogy (CLP): an approach that “teaches students to read and write against texts and understand that language and texts are not neutral and always ideological” (123).

Using CLP to read TKAM, in other words, reveals a text that on the one hand offers an anti-racist message but on the other hand is bound up with and in concert with a fundamentally racist ideology. This may be what Borsheim-Black, Macaluso, and Petrone call a dissonant realization for students, but it’s an important pedagogical opportunity.

We need to continue to do the important work of welcoming different voices into our classroom and to be sure that our literary curricula change to reflect our current student body. And surely it’s time for us to leave behind the idea that TKAM is an ideal vehicle for a complete and comprehensive discussion of the vast and complex issues of multiculturalism, race, and racism today.

Still, we need to recognize the cultural capital of Harper Lee’s novel: it continues to be idolized and adored (Macaluso 286) in our broader culture. Teaching TKAM, using the CLP model to read both with and against this text, allows students to discover for themselves the ideological complexity of this American novel.

We offer our model of text clusters and companion texts (our series with Rowman and Littlefield) as a productive component of CLP. Reading excerpts from Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad, two of the Scottsboro boys, about their experience with a lynch mob, students can see for themselves what’s left out of the near-lynching scene in TKAM. Loving v. Virginia makes visible the legal and institutional racism that forces Dolphus Raymond’s to feign drunkenness in order to protect his mixed-race family. An interview with white women who grew up with black domestics in the 30s, particularly when paired with excerpts from an interview with Dorothy Bolden, an African-American woman who worked as a domestic in the 1930s South and founded the National Domestic Workers Union, can unpack and unsettle the representation of Calpurnia.

After all, what really matters is not whether our students can read TKAM as racist or anti-racist but whether we are preparing our students to be powerful and resistant readers of the many texts of our world, including those canonical texts that occupy positions of outsized ideological power.

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TedGlobal. July 2009, Lecture, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.

Borsheim-Black, Carlin, Macaluso, Michael, and Robert Petrone. “Critical Literature Pedagogy: Teaching Canonical Literature for Critical Literacy.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58.2, Oct. 2014, pp. 123-133.

Johnson, Latrise. “Students Don’t Need Diverse Literature Just Because It’s Diverse.” NCTE, 12 April 2016, http://www2.ncte.org/blog/2016/04/students-dont-need-diverse-literature-just-diverse/.

Macaluso, Michael. “Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird Today: Coming to Terms With Race, Racism, and America’s Novel.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61.3, Nov./Dec. 2017, pp. 279-287.

Can test prep also be meaningful learning?

When we spoke at the Conference on English Leadership, after the NCTE Convention in St. Louis this November, we ran into an important and serious concern: does a focus on test preparation, at least to some degree, diminish our commitment to our students’ real and meaningful learning somehow?

Our presentation, “Supporting Teachers in Rigorous Literacy: A Matter of Access, Equity, and Opportunity,” focused on our cross-disciplinary, collaborative lessons: on male aggression in fruit flies and Lord of the Flies; on chromium contamination and gentrification near the schools where we teach; and on the microfibers in our clothes and in our oceans. Each of these lessons was centered around high-quality, challenging pieces of nonfiction; each asked students to read and think with rigor about important, relevant issues in our shared world.

Our presentation offered strategies to support all teachers in creating and developing these sorts of cross-disciplinary and challenging lessons so that all learners can succeed. We feel strongly that rigorous literacy means that all students, regardless of their learning challenges and reading levels, need to be reading high-quality texts about real issues (like male aggression, chromium contamination, and global pollution).

And yes, as we always do, we talked about using multiple-choice, PARCC-style questions (we are in a PARCC state) to prep students about vocabulary and check their understanding of the reading. We stressed how these activities should be practiced in groups, in a low-stakes environment, where the students can problem-solve answering multiple-choice style questions while developing their understanding of the reading.

It was striking, however, that one person in our audience worried out loud during our question-and-answer period (in a productive and supportive way, to be clear) about whether our work was somehow unduly shaped by concerns about test preparation. We were a bit taken aback initially: our overarching motivation for incorporating challenging informational texts into our instruction is to motivate students by tapping into relevant, engaging issues that resonate with our students’ interests and everyday lives in order to empower them to think critically about their present and future realities. We believe doing so enables us to do our best teaching and for our students to experience meaningful learning, and so we offered this explanation to our interlocutor.

But yes, these kinds of science and social studies texts are the kinds of reading we see appearing on a variety of standardized tests.

During the Q & A for our session, we also reiterated our strong belief that these kinds of high-quality, cross-disciplinary units are opportunities for the best kind of test preparation: work that can be done without taking us away from the important texts and topics we need to teach. Given that standardized tests are an unavoidable part of our students’ academic reality, and that they present a disproportionate challenge to disadvantaged students, we think this belief is very much aligned with the CEL conference theme of access and opportunity. Indeed, we feel strongly that disadvantaged student populations need explicit test preparation in schools because their more advantaged peers are getting this practice, at a high cost, in after-school programs and tutoring.

It was interesting, then, to come across a piece in The Hechinger Report suggesting that “instructional quality declined with the rise of high stakes testing, especially in the weeks before the exam.” Particularly striking was the fact that “the quality gap between a teacher’s regular lessons and her test-prep lessons was largest in a school district where the teaching quality was the highest …. instructional quality sank a lot when these excellent teachers were delivering test-prep lessons.” Research did find some high-quality test prep lessons, but the overall quality of these sorts of lessons varied widely, leading the researchers to conclude that teaching to the test “can be done well, but it’s not easy.” In other words, much test prep is done poorly, even by high quality teachers who normally deliver excellent instruction. Innovative and substantive test prep, however, is possible, but teachers needs to think hard about how to make it work well.

To us, this study underscores both our sense of urgency around meaningful test prep and the concern our audience member expressed about the deleterious impact of test prep on instruction. Whether we like it or not, American students inhabit a universe of high-stakes testing – in K-12 and well beyond. Test prep, in nearly every school, is a reality. But even our best teachers, according to this research, are probably not doing a great job at test prep. Unless we embrace the challenge of delivering high-quality test prep, we are shortchanging all our students.

We think the answer is to build high-quality instruction around some explicit and regular practice for standardized tests. That seems to be a better solution than abandoning our normally strong instruction to spend days or weeks drilling on pre-made test-prep materials or leaving all test prep in the hands of paid after-school providers who serve only those students with resources. This explicit and regular practice for standardized tests means, however, that all teachers need to take some ownership over preparing our students for this unavoidable and deeply inequitable aspect of their educational lives. Especially in districts that serve some disadvantaged students (which probably means every district today), it shouldn’t be someone else’s job to teach students how to tackle standardized tests.

Most importantly, from our perspective, doing this test prep work does not mean turning away from rigorous literacy and high-quality learning. Just as it’s part of our job to make this explicit practice a regular part of our instruction, so too is it part of our job to do so in the most meaningful way possible.

That’s why each of our informational text units includes opportunities for students to both learn about and take ownership of the issues that shape their realities and to practice answering the kinds of questions they’ll see on standardized tests. Check out our website for sample units and resources for developing your own lessons and units that can help you maximize your instructional time no matter how soon the next standardized test is.

Highlights from NerdCampNJ: Part 2

Apologies for the delay in posting part 2! The end of the school year is so busy!

We also greatly enjoyed Kate Baker’s session on using technology to promote and assess student engagement with texts. Her quick, hands-on tutorials and models for using GoFormative, EDpuzzle, and ActivelyLearn have inspired us to try them out and share them with others!

All three of the tools enable teachers to embed the kinds of discussion prompts alongside a text that we advocate in our model for supporting student success with informational texts. All three also allow students to annotate texts as they read, view, or listen. And because we always advocate the use of multimedia texts, we of course liked how EDpuzzle allows teachers to embed questions and comments in videos at various stopping points that they determine. However, it was ActivelyLearn that particularly caught our attention.

ActivelyLearn allows teachers to embed questions and comments throughout single or multiple texts included in an assignment. Comments might be used to draw student attention to a particular text feature and/or direct students to turn and talk with a partner about some aspect of the text. Questions that teachers embed in the reading must be answered before a student can continue with the reading.

Students can also annotate and post questions or comments about the text as they read, even indicating parts of the text that they are struggling with. Teachers can immediately view the responses students have submitted, give feedback on them, and have students revise them if so desired. The paid version of the platform even includes a GoogleDocs add-on that allows students to import content from both readings and their own responses in ActivelyLearn directly into a GoogleDoc!

ActivelyLearn also struck us as a great platform for cross-disciplinary collaborative assignments or projects. The model that Kate shared with us, a unit created to support students in writing a research paper on the attainability of the American Dream throughout history, included a variety of informational and literary texts (see screenshot). 

Using Kate’s model as an example, an English teacher and a history teacher could have students read and annotate specific texts during their respective classes within the collaboratively created assignment. Students could then draw from all of their work in the ActivelyLearn assignment to create some kind of cross-disciplinary project.

One thing that Kate also noted during the session was the fact that smaller tech companies like ActivelyLearn (as opposed to, say, Google!) are very responsive to teacher interest and feedback. We experienced this ourselves when we asked, through Kate, about the collaboration functionality in ActivelyLearn. Natalie from ActivelyLearn responded the same day and confirmed that teachers on the paid team and school plans can collaborate by sharing and tweaking each other’s assignments and also by co-authoring lessons together. (With the free plan, teachers would have to share an account in order to create a lesson together.) We will be looking for an opportunity to try this out. If you are able to do so, please let us know how it goes!

Highlights from NerdCampNJ: Part 1

One of the highlights of NerdCampNJ for us on May 20 was of course our panel discussion, “Literacy Across the Content Areas,” with Kell Andrews, Laurie Wallmark, and Kristy Acevedo. It was a treat to hear everyone’s different perspectives on how informational text can enhance student engagement with fiction and vice versa.

We started off by sharing some collaborations around informational texts that we’ve done with science and English teachers in Susan’s school. (The materials we shared during the session can be found here.)

YA sci-fi author and high school English teacher Kristy Acevedo then jumped in to talk about how she has her students use research to create the details and substance of the characters and worlds in their own fiction writing, using her books and her own writing and research process as models. We loved this innovative merging of research with creative writing and the way in which this enterprise engages all sorts of skills in students!

Children’s author Kell Andrews picked up that thread to talk about how she embeds the practice of research into the plots of her books like Mira Forecasts the Future. Mira is the daughter of a famous fortune teller, but she lacks the gift of telling the future by gazing into the crystal ball, so she figures out how to make predictions in her own way by learning the basics of meteorology. Andrews’ point, which dovetailed well with Acevedo’s, is that science (like meteorology) can be embedded in any kind of text, including fiction.

Laurie Wallmark, college computer science instructor and author of two illustrated biographies for children, Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine and Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code, built on all the earlier presentations in offering herself as a model. A teacher of STEM (computer science), she is also a researcher and a writer, who draws on all sorts of research and literacy skills in her work.

Clearly, the Common Core’s focus on informational text can be embraced in any number of ways. Writers know that their own work relies on their ability to research widely and incorporate information meaningfully.

One other point of emphasis that we thought was striking. Acevedo and others agreed that having students read primary informational texts (Acevedo used some of the scientific reports she consulted to write Consider) can get students to think critically about how the information they are reading is being shaped by an author. Just because Mira learns about meteorology in Mira Forecasts the Future doesn’t mean the information presented is accurate or authoritative. This latter point seems a particularly opportune one for us to think about as we grapple with fake news and try to instill in our students a healthy skepticism about the veracity of information. Just because it appears in print doesn’t mean it’s true!

Stay tuned for Part 2, which focuses on a workshop where we learned about some great tech tools that can foster active reading and cross-disciplinary collaboration! 

Thanks to Oona Abrams and the rest of the organizers for putting together this energizing event!

Using vocabulary instruction to support all learners

We were very excited yesterday to see our column, “Pairing Contemporary Nonfiction with Canonical Texts,” published in the March issue of English Journal. As we were looking over the table of contents and seeing what great company we are in, Meghan Liebfreund’s essay, “Facilitate Informational Text with Vocabulary Instruction” immediately caught our attention.

Though we have not encountered Liebfreund’s work before, we feel like we have discovered a kindred spirit. Noting the growing emphasis on informational text, she calls vocabulary instruction “crucial” to student success in comprehending it. She cites her recent study that showed “vocabulary knowledge” to be “the strongest predictor of informational text comprehension for readers in grades 3 through 5, and its influence was nearly two times larger than decoding efficiency and prior knowledge” (77).

We also wholeheartedly agree with Liebfreund that “it is vital that we provide instruction that is engaging and effective when supporting students’ vocabulary development .... [and that] enhancing vocabulary instruction often requires the implementation of several instructional strategies.” And, like Liebfreund, we advocate following the model presented by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan in Bringing Words to Life: selecting a reasonable number of “important and frequently used words,” having students interact with the words in meaningful contexts that also front-load concepts that are key to the reading, making instruction explicit, and providing ample and varied practice with the words.

The types of pre-reading vocabulary exercises we include in our model for teaching informational text also follow the criteria Liebfreund calls for, such as the explicit teaching of word forms and drawing students’attention to the multiple meanings of common words. We also believe that “[w]ord learning should be a social process that involves students talking about and sharing what they know and are learning about words” (77).

Finally, Liebfreund’s piece echoes the belief we recently blogged about: that all learners can succeed with complex informational text if given sufficient support. We know that if we make the effort to give that support, especially around the challenge of vocabulary, we create an environment where all students can succeed.

Using informational text to engage all learners: Part 2

[Click here to read Part 1.]

In order to reactivate what we had learned the previous day and in hopes of rekindling the students’ engagement, we picked up where we left off with a few final multiple-choice questions. The students read through them quietly and then offered their answers aloud. Whether their answers were correct or not, we prompted them to explain the reasoning and evidence they used in arriving at their answer, and then when needed asked follow-up questions to scaffold them toward the correct answer.

We then broke into two groups to work on two open-ended prompts. We had planned in advance to differentiate the writing work as follows: the two students who have the most difficulty with reading and writing would address a prompt that involved only the article while the other group of three students would tackle one that put the article into dialogue with a short excerpt from Lord of the Flies. In the interest of time, we asked students only to articulate a response to each part of their respective prompt and then identify evidence they would use to support their argument.

The result was an outline of a response produced by each group rather than a fully written response. This adaptation of the lesson allowed us to focus on what we considered our essential instructional goals at the moment: having the students grapple with the ideas in the text(s), articulate coherent responses to the text(s), and select relevant evidence from the text(s) to support their ideas. A complete, written response, in this case, was not necessary for our goals.

The group working with the prompt focused only on the article began by working together to draft a response to the first part of the question: “Why, according to Gorman, are the scientists interested in aggression in fruit flies?” The students drew upon the RSSE strategy (Restate, Support from the text, Support in your own words, Extend) they had previously learned to use in open-ended responses and started by restating the question. They soon realized that this left them with an incomplete response: “According to Gorman, the scientists are interested in aggression in fruit flies because ....” At this point, we went back to what we had learned from the article. After reviewing the conclusions of the study described in the article, the students completed the sentence: “...because it might help them better understand aggression in humans.” The students quickly found a quote that supported their thinking and then went on to the next part of the question.

The other group began their work by reviewing and analyzing the passage from Lord of the Flies in which the boys kill the female wild pig. The students noted the “savage” brutality of the boys’ actions and surmised that the scientists discussed in the article would be interested in studying them. They connected the behavior the scientists observed in their “fight club for flies” with that of the boys in the scene, and then wondered whether the boys had the same kinds of neurons that the scientists had found to be related to aggression in male fruit flies. While the group did not get very far in writing down its responses, the students had a rich, evidence-based discussion as they put the two texts in dialogue with each other.

We decided to move on from the lesson at the conclusion of that class so as not to exhaust student engagement. While we did not have time to fully complete the lesson, its unfinished edges, as well as the parts that students struggled with the most, gave us valuable information on both what to focus on and what to give students more practice with during future lessons.

While the students’ performance was the result of their own thinking and effort, it was also clearly built upon the support we had given them, both in terms of the scaffolding we had provided and the unnecessary obstacles we had taken away. This collection of instructional supports enabled the students to connect with this rich lesson and the ideas and skills it offered, and both the students and the teachers walked away proud of and rewarded by their efforts. However, it must be noted that the social-emotional support the teacher had previously cultivated in the class was also a key aspect of the success of this lesson. The students would not have been so willing to try something new – especially with a stranger in the room – if they had not been already accustomed to taking risks and engaging in challenging work.

Using informational text to engage all learners: Part 1

Using diverse informational texts is challenging. Real-world informational texts – e.g, newspaper articles, court decisions, and scientific abstracts – often are very long, have difficult vocabulary, and include material not relevant to instructional goals. Moreover, teachers working in classes with a large number of or composed solely of students with special needs may worry that their students cannot negotiate the challenges of this kind of material.

However, we firmly believe that all students, with sufficient support, can succeed with challenging informational text.

Susan’s recent experience working with an English class in her school validated this belief. The small class of just five classified students was studying Lord of the Flies, and the teacher agreed to co-teach our lesson that uses a New York Times article on a scientific study of male aggression in fruit flies to prompt student thinking about the violence in Lord of the Flies. We published a version of this lesson for The New York Times Learning Network, and the full-length version is featured in our volume Connecting Across Disciplines.

While classified students may sometimes be given low-level work and material that does not challenge them, fortunately, that is not always the case. This second-year teacher consistently has his students grappling with rigorous texts, and he welcomed the opportunity to incorporate a new instructional model into his practice.

The teacher began the class with a do-now prompt asking students what kinds of issues or situations annoy them and how they respond. One student’s response offered a perfect segue into the main focus of the lesson. He admitted that he sometimes struggles to control his emotions: “that’s just how my mind is; my body runs really hot.”

Susan and the teacher then moved into the lesson by showing the short, fun video created by the New York Times that accompanies the article on the fruit fly study. We first played the video straight through, then played it again, stopping several times to discuss and check for understanding. Though our students are always absorbing media, we know they sometimes do so passively, so multiple viewings of a media clip, perhaps with prompts for what to look for as needed, are key in using media clips to hook student interest successfully.

The teacher had prepared the students for reading the article the previous day by working on the vocabulary exercises for the text (in our Connecting volume). The value of this work was evident when we began reading the article; students were confident in their comprehension of the words they had studied the day before – e.g., hypothesis, neuroscientist, suppresses – and seemed to be quite willing to tackle other challenging words in the article that they had not learned previously.

During the 46-minute lesson, we read and discussed the excerpted version of the Times fruit fly article aloud as a class, using the sidebar questions designed to prompt student thinking about the text. Excerpting and using sidebars are key elements to our approach. We use excerpts and cut anything from the readings that might distract students from our instructional goals. And we create sidebar questions that prompt active reading: scaffolding for students the process of thinking and asking questions about what they are reading along the way.

As we worked through the text, an interesting trend emerged. When we asked students high-level questions about a particular phrase or sentence of the text (e.g., “The article indicates that Anderson and his colleagues identified ‘a tiny group of neurons ... that can control aggression.’ What is the idea here? Why would scientists be interested in studying aggression? Why would they care that a small group of neurons control aggression?”), they were engaged and willing to think out loud.

However, when we approached a fairly long paragraph in the article, the teacher clearly became concerned about keeping students engaged and turned away from the sidebar questions to ask students easier comprehension questions (e.g, “What is substance P?”) as we read the paragraph aloud. But when asked this kind of low-level comprehension question, the students tended to look at the text for a few seconds, make a guess, and then clam up in frustrated silence.

This of course was the opposite of what the teacher intended, but such a result makes sense. Basic recall or identification questions are often harder than they seem, especially for students who struggle with reading comprehension. If the answer is not explicitly stated in the text exactly the way it is framed in the question (“Substance P is ...”), a struggling student is likely to stare at the long block of text that contains the answer somewhere and then guess. If the student isn’t supported by the original question or follow-up questions to think about how the language in the relevant phrase or sentence works, the student’s guess is likely to miss the mark, no matter how long they stare at the text. What seems like an easy comprehension question to a teacher can often be perceived as a more challenging question to a student.

And the higher-level question, which promotes deeper engagement with big issues, can in fact be easier, even when a student has some basic reading comprehension problems. Just because a student might struggle with reading words on a page, that doesn’t mean he or she can’t think. The key is to craft questions that simultaneously supply what is needed to support students’ thinking about ideas and language and remove any unnecessary barriers that might impede that thinking. Getting students who have difficulty with reading and writing to talk and supporting them in thinking out loud are essential to helping them improve their reading and writing skills.

Though we much prefer thought-provoking, open-ended discussion and writing opportunities, we also use multiple-choice questions as part of our working through a reading for two main reasons. First, they are an inescapable part of our students’ reality, so we feel obligated to give them low-stakes opportunities to tackle such questions, especially in the often very challenging two-part formats posed by the Common Core-aligned and other high-stakes assessments. Second, they are a relatively quick way to check for understanding.

So, after our successful reading of The New York Times article excerpt, we grappled with a few multiple-choice questions, talking through them aloud as a class, during the last few minutes of the period. This gave us an important opportunity to not only check for understanding in anticipation of moving on to written responses to the article the following day but also to reinforce effective test-taking strategies and build confidence with the kinds of questions our students often struggle with on standardized tests.

The students were game for tackling these questions after reading the article and discussing the sidebar questions, especially after we explained that we would do them together. We asked what strategies they used when attempting multiple-choice questions. They said they would eliminate obviously wrong answers first; they also said they would plug the answers into the question to see if they fit. We used process of elimination to answer the first part of the main idea question. The students quickly identified the main idea of the excerpt: “Studying aggression in male fruit flies may help us understand aggression in humans.” We then asked the students what they would expect to see in a piece of evidence that supported our answer. They said that a strong piece of evidence would talk about studying aggression in male fruit flies and aggression in humans. We then used these criteria to select the three best pieces of evidence from the quotes given in the answer choices. After successfully completing this task, we reiterated to the students that whenever they see a two-part question, they should use the second part to help them check their answer to the first part.

We were so pleased by the students’ level of engagement and demonstration of high-level thinking throughout the class, we were very eager to build on our success the next day.

Using informational text to support English-language learners

At a recent gathering of New Jersey educators, a teacher I had just met asked me if our approach to using informational text would work for English Language learners.

“Yes!” I responded, and then rattled off how front-loading vocabulary, focusing on text features, and building relevance, etc. were all essential strategies for ELLs.

And then I wanted to blog about what I had said because it’s a topic we haven’t emphasized in relation to our approach to using informational text.

In a post for ASCD Express, Lydia Breiseth highlights three key strategies for building ELLs’ comprehension skills: building background knowledge, teaching vocabulary explicitly, and checking comprehension frequently.

We would argue that these strategies are key in supporting comprehension and engagement for all students, not just English language learners.

And, these strategies encapsulate both why we think using informational text in the classroom is so important and how we can support student success with such texts.

Informational texts can be powerful tools in building the background knowledge that will help students access literary texts or other informational texts. In addition, they can help increase student motivation by highlighting the relevance of curricular content to their daily lives.

In our model for using informational text (detailed in our volume Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating With Informational Text), we begin with a range of vocabulary activities that front-load both key vocabulary and concepts that students will encounter in the informational text. This primes students for success with even very challenging texts.

We advocate focusing on 8-10 key words so as not to overload students or to make vocabulary instruction too onerous and time-consuming.

We also urge teachers to prepare the text by cutting out anything that is not relevant to their instructional goals. Teachers of ELLs or any students who struggle with reading comprehension may shy away from exposing them to challenging, diverse texts, even while knowing that their students will face such texts in their future lives. Using short, engaging excerpts with sufficient support and preparation can help build students’ skills and confidence with complex texts.

To follow-up on the pre-reading vocabulary support, we encourage teachers to provide guided reading and discussion questions alongside the excerpt that direct students’ attention to key text features and concepts. Again, this kind of support is important not just for English language learners but for all students.

We follow the reading of the excerpt with writing and discussion prompts that invite students to think critically about the text and to make connections with other curricular content.

For classroom-ready examples of these kinds of informational text units, check out our volumes on using informational text to teach To Kill a Mockingbird and A Raisin in the Sun. For detailed instructions on how to build your own informational text units, on your own or in collaboration with colleagues in other content-areas, see Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating With Informational Text.

Like Breiseth, we acknowledge the time and effort required to create this kind of support for our students, but we know from classroom experience that it is well worth the effort!

Another Raisin connection: Sonia Nieto on How 'Zip Codes Still Matter'

Are you teaching A Raisin in the Sun this year? We keep coming across amazing connections to Hansberry’s play.

Here’s a quick and fun idea. Have students read Sonia Nieto’s recent column, “Zip Codes Still Matter,” published on the blog of Harvard Education Publishing. In this moving and eminently readable post, she describes her experience moving at age 13 from working-class East Flatbush to a middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. Nieto describes the transition as “both positive and traumatic.” The piece, usefully, combines her discussion of her personal experience and 2012 research by Jonathan Rothwell about discrepancies in housing costs and the disparities of opportunity across zip codes.

Then, have your students write a blog post or journal entry by Travis Younger, describing his first days at his new school in Clybourne Park. What will he notice? What will he find positive? What will be traumatic? Will Travis, like Nieto, judge the move “lucky” overall?

Cap off this creative exercise with a brief analytic one that will make your assessment easier and serve as a slightly disguised piece of analytic, evidence-based writing. Have your students discuss how they crafted their Travis entry. How do the sentiments they voiced on behalf of Travis reflect their understanding of Raisin and the world Travis inhabits before the move to Clybourne Park? How did they choose to depict Travis’s assessment of the positive and the traumatic, based on what we know of where Travis comes from in Chicago and where he is going to in Clybourne Park? And, finally, how did they use Nieto’s entry to inform their Travis entry? Having students use the play and the Nieto blog posting in crafting this reflection piece will allow you to assess efficiently and effectively their creative work while also offering more practice in evidence-based writing.

For more readings that can help students engage with the many important ideas and themes in Raisin in the Sun, and vocabulary, writing, and discussion activities to go along with them, check out our volume, Using Informational Text to Teach A Raisin in the Sun.

Finding like minds at #ILA16!

Lauren, Rebecca, Susan and Audrey with
two of our fantastic institute participants. 

The best part about conferences are the opportunities to make connections with others doing similar work. ILA has been terrific for us in that regard!

Last year at ILA 2015, we had the opportunity to see a session by Lauren K. Francese and Rebecca Marsick from Westport, CT, authors of Stretching Beyond the Textbook: Reading and Succeeding with Complex Texts in the Content Areas. We were impressed by their model for rigorous, interdisciplinary nonfiction units and immediately saw connections with our own work in our Using Informational Text series (Rowman).

We also had the opportunity to meet with the two women at the helm of CommonLit, Michelle Brown and Sarah Mielbye, who have put together a free, searchable database of cross-disciplinary fiction and nonfiction for teachers to use to create their own units and connections.

Good people with similar ideas: so we proposed a pre-conference institute for ILA 2016, and we were delighted to be accepted and to come together this past Friday to present our ideas, share our visions, and collaborate. It was a terrific session, with wonderful presentations and an informed, engaged, and curious audience. Thank you to all for your participation!

We opened with the following kickoff question: When you’re planning a unit, why is it important to include informational texts?

Many of the answers, shared through the terrific backchanneling tool TodaysMeet, are worth recapping here (so that those of us working hard on this enterprise can see our ideas reflected back by others):

• We use nonfiction text to promote connections to world.
• It is about being a global citizen through critical thinking.
• Connections to real life
• Disciplinary literacy!
• Students can make more of a connection to the world around them
• Students are very engaged by informational text.
• provide clarifying information
• real-world applications
• important for students to learn how to read in specific disciplines.
• bring an authentic voice to the unit
• Integrate reading into writing/connect to current events
• To foster democratic participation by determining bias, counterclaims, corroboration, etc.
• Teach 'em to be investigative journalist.
• to help students understand why we are "doing this" in school
• To Stretch Beyond the Textbook!!!
• To give purpose to all text
• Connect (explicitly) to something that matters

Are there challenges to doing this work? Absolutely. You are not alone if you are finding this hard work. Here are some of the issues your peers who participated in the institute struggle with:

• Finding time to locate high-quality articles aligned with content
• Finding appropriately leveled texts
• Making sure factual info is updated.
• Can be boring for a middle school student if not presented in an engaging way
• Difficulty level of text, young students first need to be taught how to read nonfiction text-structures, features
• Balance between high engaging and text complexity
• Comprehension strats - teachers doing all the work-what about allowing kids to struggle with support?
• Scaffolding text so all students can engage in a meaningful way.
• Having teachers see themselves as literacy experts in their discipline.

Susan and Audrey, together with Lauren and Rebecca, and Rob from CommonLit, shared models, strategies, resources, and tips. To share in our ideas, please check out some of our materials here. Or reach out to any of us.

Here are just a few of the key points we all emphasized in our session:

1.     Find opportunities for connections/collaborations with other teachers, even if these are built on interpersonal friendships rather than disciplinary connections

2.     Use big questions and media to engage students and spark curiosity

3.     Think about purpose and perspective with every text

4.     Remind students that everything is a text to be read and analyzed (video, images, artwork, documentaries, nonfiction, and fiction)

5.     Use activities and organizers to build students’ confidence and ability to make meaning from complex texts

In closing, we asked our participants to reflect on what they used to think in comparison to what they now think. Here are our two favorite responses:

"I used to think I was alone in merging subjects. Glad to know there are more folks like me trying to make cohesive learning experiences real."

"Don't overload by using the whole article - use excerpts of informational texts."

We are not alone. Many of our excellent peers are engaged in this work. It can be challenging, but we can employ a range of strategies, including excerpting the texts we use and collaborating with others, so that we don’t overwhelm ourselves or our students.

Informational text connections can give purpose and meaning to our content and help students develop the critical literacy skills they need to be effective learners and engaged and informed citizens.

Meanwhile, thanks again to our great audience and to all the terrific teachers and instructional leaders working hard to make literacy across the disciplines a meaningful part of every classroom for all students!