When you make the decision to move beyond long-used textbooks, you might wonder, what will kids read?
The authors of The Civically Engaged Classroom believe in the power of curated, current text sets--collections initially created by teachers that students can expand as their knowledge grows.
In this preview of the audiobook, we'll explore how to build these text sets, starting with online sources to engage students in contemporary issues. We'll also hear practical tips on text set mapping, ensuring you cover a range of perspectives and complexities, learn how to balance digital archives with print resources, introduce challenging texts and support diverse reading levels.
Transcript
Marc Todd:
The goal is to get into place several copies of multiple texts that seem especially appealing and accessible. We'll begin by examining how to create text sets from predominantly online sources, which will be essential when exploring contemporary topics and issues. Then we'll consider how to get trade books into students' hands for longer, in-depth study of historical events and to study with critical literacies.
You'll want your students to have both experiences in your classroom. The immediacy, cost-effectiveness, and limitless expanse of resources online can be balanced by the quality-controlled, carefully edited books that are published, especially for young readers. There is also something profoundly beautiful about seeing kids fall in love with book-length nonfiction. In their unit of study, Literary Nonfiction, Audra Robb and Katie Clements showed that when you give kids access to books like The 57 Bus and Hidden Figures, they will read long, dense nonfiction.
When you're building text sets, think about not just adding to kids' knowledge but disrupting their thinking as well. In Disrupting Thinking, Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst suggest that it's not only okay for kids to struggle with text, it's important. They need to text that challenge their thinking. That means text that sit outside their comfort zone in terms of point of view and information they encounter. The notion of access to non-canonical text is just as important in nonfiction as it is in fiction.
Creating online text sets in response to contemporary issues and current events. The idea of building background knowledge can call to mind images of lectures and of long required reading lists. Since the kind of vital issues and topics we engage are multifaceted and complex, aren't we responsible for ensuring that our students understand them as completely as possible before they begin? In a word, no.
Our goal in this work is to teach students how to become better readers of their own world. If we insist on spoon-feeding information, even important information, we are not helping students develop the autonomy that we eventually want them to have as informed citizens. We also run the risk of turning an important issue into something they find boring because we have over controlled access to knowledge.
Our suggestion to you is that rather than launching a study of a topic with an information dump in the form of a lecture or a single text, you instead pique kids' curiosity about a topic. Launch quickly, then give kids the time and resources to immerse themselves in a topic by reading fast and furiously. When we say read, we mean devour. When we say resources, we mean any combination of print and digital texts that will serve as a starter set for kids so they can synthesize, compare, and layer knowledge rapidly.
If this kind of energetic student-authored research is new to you, we highly recommend Chris Layman's energizing research, reading, and writing. It's a fabulous introduction to getting kids interested in research and to essential research skills. Our aim here is to teach kids to rapidly figure out the lay of the land, the terrain of a topic. We let go of perfect understanding of any one text and impossibility anyway for deeper understanding of the complexity of a topic. This teaches a skill that will serve students well throughout their lives. To learn about something new, you must first dive in and learn its terrain. If you are engaging in a deep unit of study, students will find more information about the parts they are most curious about and invested in when they have the opportunity and resources to narrow their research. To begin formulating a text set, you want to do a little text set mapping to help you plan.
It helps to ensure that you consider the complexity of an issue, topic, or event, and that you find texts that serve a variety of purposes. To balance your text set, look for text that suggests why an event happened or why a topic, or issue is important. Text that explain who is involved in this issue, topic, or event. Text that provides the background knowledge students need to understand an issue, topic, or event. Text that help students to visualize an issue, topic, or event. Text that provide multiple perspectives on an issue, topic, or event.
It is important at this point that we include multiple perspectives on the issue, even if we don't necessarily agree with all of them. Understanding others' stances also helps you to fight back more effectively against injustice. At this point in the research process, we suggest that you avoid including flawed, biased, and distorted news sources in a curated text set.
You can add those in later when you are explicitly teaching how to recognize and deal with them. We can layer texts, strategically introducing a curated text set to begin, then gradually adding to that text set as students learn more discerning evaluative skills. High engagement and personal relevance will greatly help students tackle the challenges of texts that may be above their independent reading levels.
Additionally, tackling tough texts with support from you help students to view reading as an opportunity to forge their own paths in research, not simply to accept a watered-down summarization. However, you never want to assume that kids can read a text or to leave kids floundering at frustration levels. There is still much you can do to increase access to the text kids want to read. You might offer a text introduction by highlighting some of the big ideas, showing how the text is structured, look at your starter text set.
Ask yourself, one, will all my students have access to the subject matter in ways that grab their attention and stimulate their curiosity? Do I need more texts geared to novice readers? Do I need more texts for highly proficient or expert readers?
Two, where are the gaps in my set, especially in terms of perspective? Are there perspectives that I haven't considered? Three, have I been fair to sides I might disagree with but that represent the spectrum of people's views? Four, did I provide enough visual support for my students so that they can make abstract subject matter tangible?
Five, do my text provide enough narrative to grab the attention of my readers? Are their hearts going to be as stimulated as their heads? Six, have I made it clear that students can research in multiple languages? Seven, do any of these texts involve serious, ugly moments in history or current events that might create emotional labor or even trauma for my students who have been oppressed? If so, what am I going to do to ensure those students' well-being?
If you can't answer this last question, rethink using the texts. You'll want your background starter text set to hue towards narrative reporting, photojournalism, documentaries, and in-depth first-person reports. In Minds Made for Stories, Tom Newkirk describes how the human mind is drawn to stories. We make sense of our lives and the world around us through story. Compelling stories are much more likely to grab your readers than a bar graph or list of facts.
You will also want to be alert to the potential effects of the text on your students. As you look across the text in a set, think about how the text may intersect with vulnerable students' identities and consider how you'll offer students the choice to write quietly, to not discuss in a large group, or to speak quietly with a friend or adult.
Edie:
Thanks for tuning in today. To learn more about The Civically Engaged Classroom and all Heinemann audiobooks, visit blog.heinemann.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Marc Todd teaches Social Studies at IS 289, the Hudson River Middle School in New York, and is a national presenter for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. He collaborates with teachers around the world and leads workshops and institutes on culturally relevant pedagogy and teaching students to be critical readers of history. Marc believes in immersing kids in nonfiction reading and making notebook work inside of content classes both serious and joyful. He incorporates Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed into his curriculum.
Mary Ehrenworth, Senior Deputy Director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and co-editor for the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Middle School series, works with schools and districts around the globe, and is a frequent keynote speaker at Project events and national and international conferences. Mary’s interest in critical literacies, deep interpretation, and reading and writing for social justice all inform the books she has authored or co-authored in the Reading and Writing Units of Study series as well as her many articles and other books on instruction and leadership.
Pablo Wolfe is a Washington DC-based educator who promotes civic education as a means to improve student engagement, celebrate student identity, and embolden the next generation of citizens. He's been a public school administrator, a staff developer with the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, a teacher, and a parent, and in all of these roles has sought to make school a training ground for civic life. He is the co-author of The Civically Engaged Classroom: Reading, Writing, and Speaking for Change and the Unit of Study: Historical Fiction Book Clubs. His work has also been featured in School Library Journal and Middleweb Blog.
Pablo is the Founder and Executive Director of the Coalition of Civically Engaged Educators, a national K-12 community of practice for civic-minded educators who seek to improve student outcomes and transform schools. Pablo is also a Visiting Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Whether planning town hall meetings with groups of 7th graders, writing letters to elected officials, or organizing opportunities for service learning, Pablo believes that academic skills are best learned when applied towards addressing injustices. A strong believer in the role of teachers as agents of social change, he strives to thread this idea through his writing, staff development and teaching.
