Talking informational text, social justice, and difficult conversations at NJEA

We had the opportunity to present our work to a lively and engaged group of educators on Friday at the NJEA Convention in Atlantic City. In keeping with the social justice theme of the convention, we spoke about “Collaborating with Informational Texts Across the Disciplines to Engage Students.”

Our participants felt strongly about the potential for nonfiction to engage students on issues of social justice. They cited the importance of students opening their minds to a wide range of information, especially from texts they wouldn’t normally read. They stressed the importance of using informational text to dive deeply into issues, to open their minds, understand facts and bias, and be informed.

We couldn’t agree more! We shared with participants our work on fruit fly aggression and Lord of the Flies (featured in our volume Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text), and we were thrilled to hear comments from our session participants about how this lesson can allow students to challenge the status quo of human behavior and think about the relationship between biology, gender, and social norms.

Indeed, it was clear that the teachers in the room shared our passion for using nonfiction to underscore the relevance of our content area curriculum (whether science or literature) to our students and to the world today.

It was striking and disturbing, however, to hear from the teachers in the room about their trepidation about raising social justice issues in their classrooms. Clearly, our country is at a difficult moment, and teachers, like everyone else, are struggling with ways to facilitate difficult conversations in a climate where civil discourse and debate are no longer the norm.

We offered our discussion of Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy as an entryway into discussion about nativism and white nationalism in The Great Gatsby. Stoddard is twice referenced (as Goddard) in Fitzgerald’s novel, which centers on issues of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and inequality. (This unit appears in our 4th volume, Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield in January!)

Gatsby isn’t a radical, left-wing text. It’s taught in nearly every high school in the country. And using a bit of supplemental text, like an excerpt from Stoddard, can help students unpack and discuss Fitzgerald’s references to white nationalism. Students can think about how white nationalism has worked in the past, how writers like Stoddard have used language to promote and defend a racist ideology, and how novelists like Fitzgerald interpreted and commented on the ideologues of their day. This work can equip students to think critically about the resurgence of such ideas today, whether or not those connections are made explicit in our classes.

Sadly, many teachers may find it difficult to promote open and thoughtful discussion in their classrooms, and they may worry about a political backlash if they try to engage students on current political issues.

A creative teacher, however, can use nonfiction and canonical texts, like Gatsby, to promote critical thinking and discussion without necessarily talking directly about Trump or the white nationalism in our current climate. We will be talking more about these issues at NCTE in St. Louis at the end of this week, and surely all of us will be thinking more about how we can make our classrooms places for important, engaged discussion without jeopardizing ourselves or our students.

Review: Using Informational Text to Teach A Raisin in the Sun

Teachers College Record just published (July 18, 2016) a wonderfully thoughtful review of the 2^nd volume in our Using Informational Text series, Using Informational Text to Teach A Raisin in the Sun. Lauren Capotosto clearly understands our goals in the volume, and we are grateful to her intellectual generosity. We have indeed tried to perform “the time-consuming legwork to identify appropriately complex and relevant informational texts to pair with Raisin” so that teachers can “deepen students’ understanding of both the play’s larger context and its current relevance.” Thanks, for so thoroughly understanding what we were hoping to accomplish!

In a further sign of how in tune Capotosto is with our overall project, she writes of a hope that future books in our series “might provide guidance for teachers outside the ELA classroom to teach texts through discipline-specific lenses.” Indeed, we have published our third volume, Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text, to do just that. As we know, the Common Core challenges all teachers to incorporate discipline-specific literacy into their classes, and this volume is intended to help non-ELA teachers and their ELA peers collaborate to help students read skillfully and confidently and make connections across disciplines and classrooms. 

If you're looking to revamp your curriculum for this rapidly approaching school year, whether in teaching literary classics like To Kill a Mockingbird or A Raisin in the Sun, enhancing student engagement and disciplinary literacy, or initiating collaboration across disciplines, the Using Informational Text to Teach Literature series can be a valuable resource!

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!

Highlights from ILA15

The highlight for us at ILA15 this past weekend in St. Louis (aside from the opportunity to present material from our current work-in-progress, Connect: A Collaborative Model for Using Informational Texts to Enhance Literacy Across Disciplines, to be published by Rowman & Littlefield some time in Spring 2016) was hearing dedicated and passionate educators talking about innovative ways to collaborate around cross-disciplinary literacy and informational text.

Two presentations in particular inspired us.

First, social studies teacher Lauren K. Francese and English teacher Rebecca Marsick from Westport, CT, shared their “MINDful reading” approach for enhancing literacy and engagement across disciplines.

According to Francese and Marsick, adolescence is a critical time for students to make the transition from “learning to read to reading to learn,” and so teachers of adolescents need to help them develop the cognitive tools necessary to make that shift.

Toward that goal, they created a model for rigorous, interdisciplinary nonfiction units that ask students to consider meaningful essential questions as they put texts related to the unit’s theme into dialogue.

During their presentation, they outlined several impressive units, including one on World War II, which pairs Hiroshima by John Hersey as a whole-class text with a range of related texts like Farewell to Manzanar and The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Stories of the Women Who Helped Win World War II that students can choose from.

By both allowing students to choose from a list of texts that they have pre-screened and then offering multiple options for the unit’s culminating writing assignment, Francese and Marsick effect meaningful differentiation while also providing a rigorous learning experience for all students.

In their model the students discuss the books in a book club format for 15 minutes 2-3 times per week, and they are responsible for preparing themselves for these discussions by completing reading organizers and bringing their own questions to drive the discussion.

We of course were also very interested in their collaborative English-social studies high school unit on the civil rights movement that puts To Kill a Mockingbird into dialogue with Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, centered around the essential question, “What does it mean to be a strong leader?”

They also talked about how they have adapted the degree to which they work together over the years according to their respective teaching assignments. In some years they have been able to collaborate very closely, while in others they simply coordinate their efforts in order to support and reinforce each other’s efforts.

And they shared both the tools they use to support student engagement and critical thinking and to encourage their colleagues to try out such units.

It was a treat to hear about this very valuable collaboration, which they have outlined in their book Stretching Beyond the Textbook: Reading and Succeeding with Complex Texts Across the Content Areas (Scholastic 2014).

The other presentation that we greatly enjoyed was led by a trio of science teachers. Yes, science teachers!

As we are completing our new book that outlines our collaborative model for enhancing literacy across the disciplines, the title of their session, “Integrating STEM Readings with Secondary ELA Curriculum,” attracted our attention, and we were not disappointed.

In their presentation Adam Aldridge, Eriq Hearn, and Alexis Wren, all graduate students from Georgia Regents University in Augusta, outlined their respective efforts to incorporate engaging informational and literary texts into their biology, chemistry, and physics/math classes.

Biology teacher Eriq Hearn discussed how he guided his students to consider Darwin’s The Origin of Species and the way he presents the theory of natural selection as an argument. He also hooked their interest by pairing their study of Darwin with short stories from the collection Abraham Lincoln’s DNA and Other Adventures in Genetics by Phillip R. Rilley.

Chemistry teacher Alexis Wren described how she engages students by having them consider the moral implications of chemistry in relation to the Holocaust. Using an anticipation guide, she asks them whether they think the chemists employed by the Nazis knew what their work was being used for and how they should have been punished, if at all, after World War II. She pairs their reading of an informational article, “Chemistry in Nazi Germany” by Sarah Everts, with The Periodic Table, a memoir by Primo Levi.

In addition to sharing the wonderful texts that they’ve used in their classes, these passionate young teachers also discussed the creative ways they have hooked their students’ interest (e.g., anticipation guides, written conversations) and encouraged them to demonstrate their understanding (e.g., creating comic books and movie posters).

Toward the end of their session, Hearn urged the English teachers in the audience to work with their science teachers to help them engage all of their students. (If only we all had such eager colleagues – of any discipline – to collaborate with!) And we wholeheartedly agreed with his encouragement to start by reaching out to colleagues that you like.

Finally, our ILA convention was topped off by the opportunity to meet with the two women at the helm of CommonLit, Michelle Brown and Sarah Mielbye, who were sharing their important work in the exhibition hall. Brown and Mielbye offer a growing range of accessible, engaging informational texts as a searchable database for teachers to use to create their own cross-disciplinary and informational text connections. They are also negotiating with various content providers (like NPR) and authors to allow access for student and classroom use.

We applaud and share the vision these two women have for how teachers need to be the intellectual and creative core of innovations in education. Technology, like CommonLit, may enable teachers to do this work more quickly (by providing content and helping streamline the search for content and connections), but ultimately teachers, through their energy, their experience, their collaborative impulses, and their knowledge of their students, can and should be the ones creating curricula and making change.

As is always the case, our attendance at a national conference, and the opportunity to meet with teachers and innovators from across the country (like Michele Haiken and her innovative methods for teaching Mockingbird!), has left us invigorated about our work and impressed by the good work being done by educators, young and old, experts and novices alike. (And we're looking forward to enjoying that heady mix of inspiration again at IATE, NCTE, and CEL! Join us!)

It isn’t always easy to be a teacher, but after attending ILA, we know we are in good company. 

ASCD dispatch #2: Inspiring collaboration, transformational coaching

One of the most amazing things about attending conferences is getting to see the inspiring work of committed, creative, energetic teachers and education professionals being done across the country.

We attended two sessions at ASCD 2015 that exemplified this phenomenon.

In “Collaboration that Works: Science, Literacy, and 21^st Century Skills,” Kate Cronk and Hallie Edgerly, two 8th grade teachers in science and language arts, from Adel DeSoto Minburn Community School District in Adel, IA, presented their story of spectacular collaboration across the disciplines.

They spoke about their three-year process (totally self-initiated and self-motivated) of developing a four-week cross-disciplinary unit on inventions. Their students conducted market research, including first-hand surveys, developed budgets, kept logs of their invention timelines, and reflected on their collaborative skills. They used QR codes to link to student-created infomercials about their products. The unit culminated in a visit to a local college and a “Shark Tank” style competition. There is no question that Cronk and Edgerly’s students were developing and using 21st-century skills. Equally impressive, from the many student testimonials they shared, was the pride these teachers took in how their collaborative, cross-disciplinary project fostered their students’ social skills, brought out the strengths of individual students with specific weaknesses, and even reduced bullying.

Cronk and Edgerkly were frank about their own learning process, about how they needed to improve their own interactions with other teachers, how they could involve other teachers even when those teachers were unable to give up classroom time, and how they both grew as teachers from the project.

What’s perhaps most impressive in their work is how it required little administrative or material support (albeit their administrators did not throw up road blocks). Their story was simply the age-old take of two individuals with initiative putting in the work and making a tremendous difference in the lives of the children in their school.

The second session we want to highlight was not about a small or simple intervention. In “Instituting a Culture of Collaboration: The Instructional Coaching Model,” a team from Randolph High School in New Jersey, Adriana Coppola, Ruth Forrest, Julie Green, and Lena Wasylyk, described the impressive model they developed after their district created a space for these four dynamic women to institutionalize instructional coaching.

In this high-energy and interactive session, this team shared the lessons from their three years of working as instructional coaches. Their model works off an entirely voluntary approach: teachers come to the coaches for advice, from where to make copies to how to deal with a difficult class to how to develop a DBQ for a math classroom. The team offers one-on-one coaching, co-teaching, specialized professional development sessions, and so much more.

The keys to this approach seem to be the dynamic team leaders but also the confidential, voluntary, non-evaluative model, in which teachers can seek out their peers for specific, timely support that they need from peers they trust. Kudos to the team in Randolph for their great work and to the administrators for giving this team the support they need to be successful.

And kudos to ASCD for showcasing these, among many examples, of best practices in today’s educational universe.

ASCD dispatch #1: We need to collaborate

We’ve been enjoying our first day at ASCD in Houston, meeting with interesting and engaged educators from across the country.

A few ideas struck us from our first day of conversations:

• As we get further into implementation of the Common Core, we need to remember the challenge the standards pose to busy teachers. Not everyone has mastered the new standards. And, in particular, we need to help our content area colleagues understand and implement the new Language Arts standards in math/science and social studies.
• Along the lines of #1, if we, as language arts teachers, take on the entire burden of teaching a science-based informational text unit, we aren’t helping our science colleagues adapt and adjust. Ask your science colleague (start with a teacher you like!) about a unit that the students struggle with (or about one that they find really exciting) and suggest a few informational text connections that you can work on together to meet the History/Social Studies and Science Literacy standards and build (or build on) student motivation and engagement in the content area.
• Today, we all need to be readers and broad intellectuals. None of us can afford to teach the same old essays and literary texts. And none of us can afford to read narrowly and only in our disciplines. If we are going to teach students to make connections across the disciplines and to be strong readers of a wide variety of complex texts, we need to get out of our silos and be doing the same work ourselves!
• Along the lines of #3, especially on the secondary level, text-to-text connections are so crucial to education today. Students learning about a concept in physics need to be able to apply that knowledge to a news story about safety issues with roller coasters. Students studying thinking about food safety and the sustainability of our food practices can benefit from thinking about how thinkers have explored these issues in a variety of texts, historical contexts, and genres (such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle).

The biggest takeaway, as is so often the case at these gatherings, is how devoted educators are to their craft and their calling. We have many balls in the air and many demands on our time, but we are in good company as we do this important work!

Text to Text: Opportunities for rich, cross-disciplinary collaboration and learning

When we began this work, we had some idea of the rewards we would find in pairing great informational texts to with our favorite literary texts, and we hoped that our efforts would help language arts teachers and their students reap such the benefits more easily. However, as we continued creating units around such pairings and sharing our model for doing so, we found that these kinds of activities are perfect opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration that can enhance students’ engagement with and understanding of both literary texts and texts in content areas like science and history. (For this reason, informational texts provide ideal opportunities for preparing students for the CCSS-aligned assessments!)

Our second “Text to Text” feature, just published on the New York Times Learning Network, is an example of the rich, multi-faceted learning that can occur when a literary text, like Lord of the Flies, is put into dialogue with an article that opens up discussion of an important theme in the novel in a way that makes connections with students’ contemporary world and draws and/or builds upon their knowledge from another discipline. The New York Times article featured in this “Text to Text” lesson discusses a study of fruit flies that offers some possible clues about the source of aggression in human males. The lesson also offers extension activities on bullying and aggression among girls.

As we English teachers want to bring all kinds of texts into our classrooms, we can certainly use such a lesson based on the interplay between Lord of the Flies and the fruit fly article on our own, but it also offers us a great opportunity to collaborate with our students’ biology teachers and enhance student literacy in both disciplines. If you’re teaching Lord of the Flies soon, check out the lesson and then walk down the hall to see what your students’ science teachers will be up to in the coming weeks. The stars might be aligned for some fantastic cross-disciplinary collaboration!

If you’re not teaching Lord of the Flies, check out our “Text to Text” feature on A Raisin in the Sun or our volume of informational text units on To Kill a Mockingbird. Or take the plunge yourself, and start looking for great informational texts with our list of suggested resources. Share it with a content-area colleague and do this great work together!

If you are attending ASCD’s Annual Conference, we hope you will join us on Sunday, March 22, from 3-4:30pm, when we will be talking more about the benefits of cross-disciplinary collaboration! (We’ll also be doing so at ILA2015 in July!)

Cross-disciplinary collaboration in English Leadership Quarterly

We began our work together around the informational text standard of the Common Core. We wanted to encourage language arts teachers to think about ways to use informational text to enhance their teaching, particularly so that they wouldn’t feel that using informational text meant moving away from literature. Our goal was (and is) to help language arts teachers see that informational text can connect with and enhance the literary content.

Somewhere along the way, we realized that content area teachers in all the disciplines needed help in thinking about how informational text could connect with and enhance their content as well. And they also needed help in thinking about the literacy skills necessary to negotiate these texts. 

So we started adapting the materials we’d developed for using informational text to teach literature in order to make them better serve content area teachers. And we started to think about how language arts teachers and other content area teachers could use this moment as an opportunity to come together and collaborate.

This kind of cross-disciplinary work is time consuming; and all collaboration poses significant challenges. But we want our students to succeed and we want our teaching to meet the demands of the Common Core and of the 21^st century, so we need to rise to these new challenges.

This week our reflections on professional development that can help teachers meet these challenges has been published in English Leadership Quarterly. We hope that our efforts might provide a model or stepping-stone for other educators embarking on this challenging but rewarding journey. 

Collaborating to capitalize on the opportunities of informational text

In an April 27 Baltimore Sun article on the contention surrounding the Common Core, Catonsville high school teacher Kate Hamill notes her concerns about the informational text mandate. She worries “about the reduction of time for literature” and the fact that “middle- and high-school students don't any longer read enough challenging nonfiction in their other classes." Most English teachers are like Hamill; we can’t and don’t want to be responsible for all the informational text (forcing a reduction in time spent reading literature). The CCSS explicitly say that we aren’t. But the devil, here, is in the details of the implementation. Cross-disciplinary collaboration in the implementation of the Common Core is key.

When we collaborate, informational texts that are selected and used well can be rewarding supplements that open up existing units in a variety of disciplines in enormously valuable ways.

In the last month or so, we’ve been fortunate to meet and talk with dozens of dedicated English, social studies,and science teachers in New Jersey about seizing the opportunities ofinformational text. Working together, we can support our students’ success in meeting the literacy challenges specific to each of our disciplines and those we hold in common, while breaking down the institutional divides that often inhibit our students’ thinking and understanding of our subjects and of their relationships to each other and the world they live in.

While we were able to spark and hear some great ideas and conversations during the workshops themselves, finding common planning time on a regular basis to sustain collaboration is often difficult. One method we found for facilitating ongoing collaboration was to create and share a GoogleDrive spreadsheet in which teachers enter the topics and titles of texts they plan to teach throughout the school year. Their grade-level colleagues can check the spreadsheet for opportunities for collaboration and then look for engaging informational texts that will mutually benefit their respective instructional goals. Focusing on a common informational text from different vantage points or reading thematically related informational text connected to content-specific topics can offer students deeply rich and rewarding reading and thinking experiences that will support their success in their classwork, on standardized tests, and in the world beyond.

Collaboration, Proofiness, and The Crucible

We’ve had lots of snow (and snow days!) in New Jersey and so time to catch up on some of our reading. Tara Seale’s piece, “Creating Synergy beyond the English Hall,” in the January 2014 issue of English Journal (103.3) caught our attention for its intriguing suggestion of a non-fiction pairing.

Seale talks about how she shares tips and advice with a math colleague (the bulk of Seale’s article is about transformative collaborations like this). She mentions a particular tip from her friend: Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception, by Charles Seife. In the introduction to his text, Seife discusses Joe McCarthy’s use of numeric proof to bolster his argument about communist infestation of the United States. As Seale writes, “the introduction alone is a good nonfiction excerpt to add to a study of The Crucible. Proofiness explains the importance of numbers to any argument and how numbers distort or enhance arguments.”

What a great informational text connection! And what a great point about how helpful it can be to tap the knowledge of our non-language arts colleagues for ideas for these kinds of connections. Good work, Tara Seale!