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Learning Network's initiative

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How far would you go to follow your moral beliefs if they conflicted with the laws of the state?

Sophocles' Greek tragedy "Antigone," which has been called " the most powerful political play ever written," has posed this question in performances around the world for over 2,000 years, and continues to be just as relevant today as when it was written in 441 B.C.

Though we offer options for considering the play through adaptations from many other times and places, in this Text to Text we focus primarily on pairing Sophocles' work with the work of a contemporary Spanish flamenco dance company. "Antigona" reanimates the play in all its roiling passion, despair and sacrifice - through flamenco as well as through the street-dance style of krumping.

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Although Reconstruction took place 150 years ago, its echoes are still being felt across the country - in the campus protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, an entrenched racial economic inequality and a longstanding voting rights battle. What happened during the post-Civil War period, and how we understand what happened, matters.

In this Text to Text lesson, we pair Eric Foner's Op-Ed essay "Why Reconstruction Matters" with an excerpt from W.E.B. Du Bois's 1935 book "Black Reconstruction in America." Both document how biased historiography from the early 20th century has helped to perpetuate inequality and injustice for generations of Americans.

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How private should your genetic information be? Can scientific researchers and pharmaceutical companies use your cells for the sake of scientific advancement? These are not just hypothetical questions. For the descendants of Henrietta Lacks, and for more and more patients and their families, these are pressing ethical questions that need answers and clear policies.

For this Text to Text, we invite students to explore the science and ethics of using human cells and tissue for medical research through the lens of Rebecca Skloot's 2010 book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," and a related 2013 Op-Ed.

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On Feb. 3, 2015, a Times News Alert announced the stunning headline: " Harper Lee, Author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' Is to Publish a Second Novel. "

Fifty-five years after "Mockingbird" first appeared, this surprise announcement created a literary sensation. The new book, "Go Set a Watchman," already tops pre-order bestseller lists and has spurred its own share of controversy.

Whether you've responded to this news with delighted anticipation, concerned skepticism or something in between, the recent attention to Ms. Lee and her work reminds us of the central place "Mockingbird" has in our literary culture. It's a perennial favorite in schools and, according to one study, the most-recommended book among American readers.

Although the themes, setting and characters of "Mockingbird" could be paired with any number of pieces from The Times's vast archive, our guest writer, Laura Tavares from Facing History and Ourselves, has chosen a recent article that situates the novel in its historical context and also raises important questions about race, justice and memory in our society today.

Below, she pairs Chapter 15 of the novel with a recent Times article on the Equal Justice Initiative report documenting the history of racial lynching in the United States.

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In this Text to Text we feature an excerpt from " Speak," a 1999 National Book Award finalist that is regularly taught, and regularly challenged, in schools across the country.

We've paired the novel, which is about a high school freshman who is sexually assaulted at a party, with a 2013 Op-Ed essay by a woman who was raped by a classmate when she was 16.

As with all our lesson plans, but especially one about a subject this sensitive, please preview the material below to make sure it is appropriate for your students.

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Text to Text - The Learning Network Blog - The New York Times

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How far would you go to follow your moral beliefs if they conflicted with the laws of the state? Sophocles' Greek tragedy "Antigone," which has been called " the most powerful political play ever written," has posed this question in performances around the world for over 2,000 years, and continues to be just as relevant today as when it was written in 441 B.C.

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Teaching novels in the era of Common Core

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Teaching novels in the era of Common Core

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A blog by Ryan McCarty

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The teaching of literature, and novels in particular, has been a subject of some controversy and confusion since the advent of the Common Core.

The standards' call for a greater percentage of informational text (increasing from an equal percentage of informational and literary in fourth grade, to 70% informational and 30% literary by grade 12) was seen as a sign the standards were trying to phase out literature. However, these percentages were cumulative across the whole school day and reflect reading that should be happening in content area classes, like science and social studies.

While the amount of informational text read in most ELA classrooms will increase, the introduction to the standards clearly states, "The ELA classroom must focus on literature (stories, drama and poetry) as well as literary nonfiction."

In fact, the standards themselves contain an appendix of text exemplars that include many well-loved novels, ranging from classic to more contemporary. For instance, the grade 6-8 list includes everything from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. According to recent surveys, teachers still consider novels a central part of the curriculum. So how do teachers continue to teach novels while simultaneously making shifts, such as building knowledge through nonfiction and incorporating close reading into their instruction?

Use Novels as "Anchor Texts" for Larger Units

My previous blog talked about ways to support students in reading complex texts. One recommendation is to include them as part of larger units organized around a central understanding about content and framed by a focusing question. These units culminate in a writing assignment addressing the focusing question.

In such units, a novel can become an "anchor text" alongside other literary and informational text. According to Transformational Literacy, a book by Ron Berger and the Expeditionary Learning team, an anchor text is "the centerpiece of students' reading," a central text that is rich, complex, and engaging, that all students read and analyze to build knowledge and literacy skills. It is the "sun" that all other informational articles, poems, charts, or videos of a unit circle around. The additional texts all help students to arrive at the central understanding and answer the focusing question.

The free Engage NY curriculum modules include several examples of units designed in this way. In one 6th grade unit, the central understanding is the delicate balance between human needs and the needs of the natural world. The focusing question is, "Do the benefits outweigh the harmful consequences of DDT?" Students read the novel Frightful's Mountain, which includes the perspective and experiences of Frightful, a peregrine falcon threatened by human influence on the environment. Then they read several nonfiction articles and view videos about DDT. They learn about its benefits for humans as a pesticide which is meant to kill mosquitoes and prevent malaria, and the harm it causes the environment. By the end of the unit, they draw upon all these sources as evidence as they discuss their position with peers, and finally write an argumentative essay.

Using a novel as the anchor text helps students engage deeply with the central idea, while the additional readings on the same topic help them systematically build the background knowledge they need to be able to write and reason effectively. The featured lessons on the Achieve The Core website, and the Vermont Writing Collaborative's instructional sequences, are great resources for units that are backwards designed from a central understanding, with focusing questions and culminating writing prompts.

Use Novels for Close Reading

When I was a student, reading a novel meant a reading assignment followed by a quiz the next day that was meant as a "gotcha," with questions about obscure details. The message this sends to kids is that everything is equally important, and that is definitely not the case.

Rather than asking students to memorize facts or closely read everything, teachers should select a few turning points throughout the novel where the theme is addressed. Keep these short, no more than a handful of pages in length. Ask students to read these sections closely. This may mean having students read the section repeatedly, asking text-dependent questions and having students discuss, and including a brief writing prompt. The idea is to help students engage with text that is relevant to the central understanding. Notice and Note by Beers and Probst is a great approach for finding these turning points, with the eventual goal of helping students find them independently.

Choosing a few key points in the novel for close reading will set students up for success on their culminating writing task - they have already thought deeply about important evidence and begun to develop a perspective on the focusing question. The annotation, notes, and short written responses from these close reading experiences serve as the raw material for their argumentative essay draft. Having a focusing question gives students a lens to sift through all the information they encounter in the various texts and videos. With the focusing question in mind, they will know to pay less attention to information about a peregrine falcon's markings or calls, and more about how the pesticide DDT causes the falcon's shell to become brittle, devastating the birds' population.

Has the way you're using novels changed with the advent of the Common Core? What are some of your most successful units incorporating novels? Let's discuss in the comment section below.
Ryan McCarty is a coach with Achievement Network, a nonprofit organization that helps school leaders support teaching that is grounded in standards, data, and the best practices of schools across the country. He partners with schools in Massachusetts. Prior to that, he was a literacy coordinator, instructional coach, and teacher in Chicago, IL. All views are his own. Follow Ryan on Twitter: @RyanP_McCarty.

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The teaching of literature, and novels in particular, has been a subject of some controversy and confusion since the advent of the Common Core. The standards' call for a greater percentage of informational text (increasing from an equal percentage of informational and literary in fourth grade, to 70% informational and 30% literary by grade 12) was seen as a sign the standards were trying to phase out literature.

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10 Ways to Use the New York Times for Teaching Literature

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10 Ways to Use the New York Times for Teaching Literature

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From the Learning Network

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Barry Blitt

Classics, contemporary fiction, young adult and graphic novels, sequels and adaptations: Here are 10 ideas that will help any teacher use the vast resources of NYTimes.com to show students the connections between any type of literature and life.

1. Certain classics have appeared on a majority of high school English lists every year since the 1960's, and many, if not most, are likely somewhere in your own school's curriculum. We have made special Teaching Topics pages of Times and Learning Network resources for many of these, including:

Use the comment field below to let us know what other works of literature you'd like to see us create a Teaching Topics page about.

2. But say you're teaching a book - perhaps a work of nonfiction - that we haven't made a special collection for, and you want to scare up some relevant and interesting Times features to share with students.

To find Times articles from 1851-present related to almost any book, use Site Search. On the left-hand side of the page, you'll see that you can narrow or widen your search by time frames or specific dates, so you can put in just one year - 1963, for instance - or search the entire history of The Times.

Take, for example, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." If you do a site search for "Huckleberry Finn," you'll see that one of its very first mentions in The New York Times came in 1885 in the form of an editorial republished from the Springfield Republican. Headlined "Trashy and Vicious," it comments on the Concord Library's ban of the book. Among other things, you would also find:

You might choose one of these for students to consider as they read "Huck," or you might have them skip through the archives themselves and muse on what they find there and how it affects their reading of the novel.

Update: Another way to search? You might try The Times's new Image Search (beta) to surface interesting articles, photographs and illustrations. For instance, try putting in an author's name, book title, setting, or even theme ("identity") and see what comes up.

3. To enrich students' understanding of works' settings, you might use Times Topics pages and the Multimedia/Photo Archive to find related articles, photographs, video, interactive graphics or podcasts.

For example, if you're teaching "The Grapes of Wrath", the Great Depression page has a short overview of the social, political, and economic conditions of the period, as well as photo slide shows of both black and white and color photographs from the era. The page also highlights several videos in The New Hard Times series in which people who were alive during the Great Depression compare it to conditions today.

Similarly, Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl," Elie Wiesel's "Night" or "The Book Thief" might be taught using resources from the Times Topics page on the Holocaust, or with our special Holocaust collection.

And just for fun, the interactive Literary Map of Manhattan might teach your students about writers like J.D. Salinger and Ralph Ellison, or might inspire them to create their own map or itinerary that features the literary landscape of another region, state or country.

4. Show students the relevance of what they read to "the real world" by having them connect key quotes from the work to news articles, photos and editorials in The Times that echo this idea. How do these three famous quotes, for example, resonate today? What contemporary connections can students find in The Times? (Update: We now have a Literature Quote Bingo game (PDF) to help.)

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." ("A Tale of Two Cities")

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." ("The Scarlet Letter")

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." ("Diary of a Young Girl")

5. Maybe your students are reading contemporary fiction like "The Kite Runner," "The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" or "Life of Pi". Or perhaps they're recommending new titles to each other in preparation for a book group.

If so, the Books section offers podcasts and a blog with news and interviews about these and other popular books and writers. In December each year The Times also chooses 100 Notable Books of that year to recommend.

6. Or, perhaps, you teach young adult literature or pair YA novels with classics. In our lesson It's the Same Old Story we highlight commonalities between the "Twilight" series and other literature, and the lesson can easily be adapted to work with any young adult novel, from the "Harry Potter" series to "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian".

To give your students models of how to think critically about YA books, you might assign such pieces as the 2006 essay by Naomi Wolf about the "Gossip Girl," "A-List" and "Clique" novels and the 2009 essay by Ned Vizzini about stereotypes in young adult fiction.

7. A common literature class assignment: to consider or create adaptations of literary works. Students might rewrite a portion of a literary text, either updating it, writing a new story inspired by the old, telling the story from a different point of view or recasting it in a new genre or under new conditions.

You might also point out the many published works that reinvent classics, such as the recent legal battle over the "Catcher in the Rye" sequel illustrated. This article lists many famous "sequels," including the critically acclaimed "The Wide Sargasso Sea" and the creative
"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies".

And if your students are critically reviewing film adaptations - or drafting their own ideas for the movie version of a book they're reading - they might find and read the Times movie review and other commentary on adaptations (such as Joyce Carol Oates's Opinion piece on the Disney version of "The Scarlet Letter"). These two lessons will help students compare book and movie versions of the same work: Setting the Stage From the Page and What a Character! Comparing Literary Adaptations.

8. If your students are delving into author biography, a good place to start is the Times Topics pages about them. Find them quickly and easily using the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of the Books section, which features many writers from Jane Austen, Nikolai Gogol, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Edgar Allan Poe and Albert Camus to Raymond Carver, Stephen King and Edwidge Danticat.

Use these pages to discover intriguing tidbits about writers, like how Amy Tan came to write "The Joy Luck Club," why Sandra Cisneros got mostly C's and D's in 5th grade and how Salman Rushdie uses his computer to compose his works.

9. Graphic novels, such as "Persepolis" and "Maus," are taught across the curriculum in many schools. Here are two useful essays about graphic novels, one about the genre in general, and another about their use in schools. Our lesson That's the Story of My Life has students creating their own storyboards for graphic novels about adolescence.

10. For more ideas, explore our ever-expanding trove of language arts lesson plans. (Tip: All of our lessons on literature since fall 2009 are tagged "literature," but there are many more, going back to 1999.)

You'll find a range of lessons about particular authors and genres, as well as activities encouraging having fun with and opening new vantage points on literature, such as these:

What other ways do you use The Times to complement your teaching of literature? Share your ideas here, and we may feature them on the blog.

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Katherine Schulten and Holly Epstein Ojalvo

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10 Ways to Use The New York Times for Teaching Literature

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Barry Blitt Classics, contemporary fiction, young adult and graphic novels, sequels and adaptations: Here are 10 ideas that will help any teacher use the vast resources of NYTimes.com to show students the connections between any type of literature and life. 1.

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Using Nonfiction to Enhance Literature Study

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Using Nonfiction to Enhance Literature Study

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An English Journal article