Resources
Here are a few of the resources I’ve shared recently. Most are available in Love and Literacy. I hope they can be helpful to you!
Chapter 1: Build A complexity Curriculum
Read the first part of Love and Literacy — about overall curriculum design here.
1-Pager: Strategies for Reading Info. Text
We’ve used these techniques to build strong habits of mind — and making student thinking visible — when reading informational text. A blog post about it is here.
1-Pager: Analyzing Literary Text
Give your students concrete language to talk and think about analysis. You can find a blog post about coaching students to zoom in and zoom out on diction here.
Resource: Genre Thinking Jobs
Help your students activate the schema they have about genre structures using these resources — you can build them right into your own student writing handbooks. A related post is here.
Resource: Classroom Habits of Discourse
In Love and Literacy, we show a series of videos to demonstrate the power of building classroom habits around discourse — not just how students speak to each other, but how they push the content of conversation to new depths. Here are habits you can share with your students.
1-Pager: Student Discourse
We spend a large section of Love and Literacy detailing how to maximize student voice and thinking during discourse. Taken from our 40-page Reading and Writing Handbook, this one-pager is a one-stop guide to the top moves we discuss and demonstrate through video clips.
1-Pager: Reading Poetry
If a student ever tells me they don’t like poetry, my first instinct is that they may not have learned how to read it. Rather than racing through the poem, this approach helps them read in rounds, noticing different elements of the text at each pass.
really short stories
Here’s a list of stories short enough to be read and discussed within a single class session (or two) — with links! These are great places to workshop analytical and student discourse skills. (See related resources above!)
Poems for teaching, organized by Complexity
Here’s a list of great poems for your classroom, with 1-2 aspects of what makes each piece complex highlighted. Use it as resource to help you locate texts that meet your students’ needs or class’s goals! (For more on building a curriculum around text complexity, check out chapter 1 of Love and Literacy, linked above.)