Beyond Textbooks: (Re) Discovering Nonfiction

As I listened to Nonfiction Books for Teens, this month’s episode of the ReadWriteThink.org Text Messages podcast, I felt a definite connection to host Jennifer Buehler as she recounted her “discovery” of nonfiction. In her introduction to a compelling set of titles, she discusses her longstanding affinity for fiction, noting that there lingers with nonfiction a negative association with dry, fact-filled textbooks.

She acquired that negative view toward nonfiction—as so many readers have—from the academic reading required of her in school.

If textbooks are the primary source of nonfiction reading with which students engage, it’s little wonder that we find it difficult to build a culture of literacy in schools that involves sustained work with text other than fiction.

I’ve been inspired by a pair of mathematics teachers who, like Jennifer, see the value in exposing students to carefully selected, high quality nonfiction. I worked with them recently as they began shaping a plan to engage students in an investigation of the question “What is trigonometry?” through a variety of nonfiction texts.

I offered to do an assessment of available resources and made a trip to our local library to look for trade nonfiction about mathematics. I’m ashamed to admit my surprise at how many relevant, well-written books I was able to find right away. I’m not ashamed to admit that on the spot, I devoured a chapter on the mathematical archetype of “threeness” in nature, art, and science.

While it’s true that many of the texts I found didn’t match the goal these teachers had in mind, we were able to establish the foundation of a collection that those teachers can use to get students started in a meaningful mathematical investigation through text. And the added bonus, of course, is that students will get to see that people write real books about math!

As you reflect on the learning goals you have for students in the upcoming school year, consider the role authentic nonfiction text has in your instructional plan. And think about how you might support colleagues, especially those in content areas other than English, in an effort to share quality informational text with students. Jennifer's recommendations provide an excellent start, as she covers territory from American history to ecology to natural science to sociology.

As it turns out, the basis of the affinity many of us have for great fiction—compelling ideas and engaging writing—is right there for (re)discovery in nonfiction as well.

Google Lit Trips: Literary Maps Meet 21st Century Literacy Skills

This summer, I’m exploring a variety of Web sites and tools that you can use in the classroom and/or for your own professional development. Each week, I’ll talk about how it works, point out related sites, and discuss classroom connections. This week, I focus on using Google Earth to create 21st Century Literary Maps.

Looking for ways to combine digital literacy skills, research, literary study, reading and writing for the web, and more? All you need is Google Lit Trips! This one tool can provide cross-curricular connections, literary exploration, and 21st century literacy skills. It’s simple. Literary Maps + Google Earth = a great classroom resource!

Literary maps were a highlight of NCTE’s Annual Convention last November. In case you’re unfamiliar, a literary map shows locations related to a piece of literature, the life of an author, or literary locations in a particular place (e.g., all the authors born in a state).

When NCTE first began inviting affiliates to bring literary maps to convention, the maps were typically made of poster or display board, like those shown in the 1994 English Journal article “The Making of a Literary Map.” The maps included in Google Lit Trips show what happens when literary maps are plotted out online, on the backdrop of the satellite maps that comprise Google Maps.

This image shows the locations on a Google Lit Trip for Elie Weisel’s Night, created by Technology Integration Coordinator Jerome Burg.


Burg, who teaches at Granada High School in Livermore, CA, has plotted significant locations on the map of Europe, indicated by the Stars of David. When loaded in Google Earth, the map includes pop-up windows that include additional information, links, and photos. To see how the maps work, watch my overview of several maps.

What’s it take to use these maps in the classroom? A free copy of Google Earth and a download of the map from the Google Lit Trips on the site. The Lit Trips site includes instructions and tips making the process very easy. You can use the maps that are already on the site or design maps yourself or with students. Go ahead. You’ll find it strangely addictive.


Convention Connection! Google Lit Trips creator Jerome Burg will present “GoogleLitTrips: Make a World of Difference in Your Classroom” at NCTE’s Annual Convention in San Antonio in November.

Online Tools for Poets

Looking for some online fun as you celebrate National Poetry Month? These tools provide some great places to start!

• Write the Acrostic Poems the typical way they are taught, asking students to compose poems that highlight their names or significant nouns. Try the activity with literature by having students compose poems for character and place names in a recent reading (e.g., Boo Radley, Maycomb, Atticus Finch). Extend Acrostic Poems to content areas by asking students to create acrostics for key vocabulary terms.
  
  
• Invite students to publish their poems with the Stapleless Book. Students might write a series of shorter poems, one on each page of the book. Haiku lend themselves to this strategy. The Stapleless Book can also be used to publish one poem, with a line or two on each page of the book.
  
  
• Combine a bit of grammar review with poetry by asking students to compose Diamante Poems, which use specific parts of speech to contrast different aspects of a single topic or to compare two different topics. The technique can work well in a review of thematic units such as “innocence to experience” or to compare two characters from a work of literature (e.g., Othello and Iago).
  
  
• Explore the genre of Letter Poems with students and then ask students to use the Letter Generator to publish their work. Elementary teachers can use the ReadWriteThink lesson plan Letter Poems Deliver: Experimenting with Line Breaks in Poetry Writing, which incorporates the online tools.
  
  
• Describe objects in poems that are published in the object's shape with Shape Poems. Students can publish poems about Nature, School, Sports, and Celebrations. For example, after a study of the Water Cycle publish shape poems in the shape of the sun, a raindrop, or a cloud.
  
  
• Have a bit of fun online with Magnetic Poetry Kids' Kits, High School Kit, or general collections, including a Shakespeare Kit. Note that some of the general sets will not be appropriate for students (e.g., the Innuendo Kit or the Pickup Lines Kit), so provide students with the direct link to the tools that you choose rather than sending them to the general collections page.
  
  

Model Reader

I became a better teacher yesterday when I attended Doug Fisher’s Web Seminar “All Teachers Are Not Teachers of Reading, but....” (You can order an archived copy of the session if you missed it.) Most of my teaching has been done in a college English classroom, where students presumably come in the door with basic reading skills already mastered. I never really spend much time on the matter of reading instruction.

During Fisher’s seminar yesterday, however, I realized why class discussion and students’ writing were often less successful when I assigned complex or unfamiliar texts—I never showed students how to read them. I simply expected them to already know how.

At the same time, I knew why one of my more successful writing assignments had worked. Students were writing explications of a song of their choice. I brought in the lyrics to “Old Friends/Bookends” by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and then went through the lyrics carefully, line-by-line and word-by-word, demonstrating how I explicate a text. Reading the lyrics went beyond simply reading the text out loud. Reading, in this instance, involved modeling how to read a text.

While it was natural for me to model how to navigate a literary text, somehow it never occurred to me until yesterday that I also need to spend modeling how to read other non-literary texts in the classroom. I immediately changed the lesson plan I am currently writing. I had been concerned about the appropriateness of one of the resources in the lesson, FTC guidelines for endorsements and testimonials. I feared that the language and legal style might make the document too complex for secondary readers.

As Fisher and seminar attendees shared strategies for teaching content-area reading, I realized that I needed to add modeling to the lesson that shows students how to read the unfamiliar text before I expect them to navigate the document on their own. It seems like such a simple and obvious recognition now. If a text might be too complex for students to comprehend, I need to show them how to read it. I never expected students to suddenly know how to write, but I guess I always expected them to simply know how to read. Thanks to Doug Fisher’s seminar yesterday, now I know better.

Strategies for Teaching with Nonfiction

The Language Arts article "A New Way to Look at Literature: A Visual Model for Analyzing Fiction and Nonfiction Texts" (G) explains why nonfiction texts are important to students’ literacy skills. Nonfiction texts are a part of everyday life. Outside the classroom, there are bus schedules, instructions on microwave dinners, and websites with advice on getting the most out of video games. At school there are content area texts for every class from science to the arts. There are sports reports and the latest celebrity news to keep track of. And in a year where Americans are voting on their next president, there are political advertisements, interviews, and voting ballots to read and understand.

Nonfiction texts are truly everywhere, but for many language arts teachers, these texts are challenging to teach. Often more accustomed to the demands of teaching fiction, teachers must tap different strategies to incorporate instruction on the diction, text structures, and other features of nonfiction texts. Each of the ReadWriteThink lesson plans below models effective strategies for incorporating nonfiction texts in the classroom—with projects ranging from inquiry study to strategy lessons, and content areas ranging from social studies to science and math:

• Searching for Gold: A Collaborative Inquiry Project (E)
• Literature as a Jumping Off Point for Nonfiction Inquiry (E)
• Comparing Fiction and Nonfiction with Little Red Riding Hood Text Sets (E)
• Animal Study: From Fiction to Facts (E)
• Bridging Literature and Mathematics by Visualizing Mathematical Concepts (E)
• Finding the Science Behind Science Fiction through Paired Readings (M)
• Investigating the Holocaust: A Collaborative Inquiry Project (M)
• Picture Books as Framing Texts: Research Paper Strategies for Struggling Writers (M)
• An Exploration of Text Sets: Supporting All Readers (M)
• Family Memoir: Getting Acquainted With Generations Before Us (S)
• Using Student-Centered Comprehension Strategies with Elie Wiesel’s Night (S)
• Exploring Language and Identity: Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and Beyond (S)
• Having My Say: A Multigenre Autobiography Project (S)
  
  

Improving Content Area Literacy

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) Report “Preparing STEM Teachers: The Key to Global Competitiveness” was released as part of a Congressional Briefing last week. The document highlights more than 50 programs at institutions across the country dedicated to increasing the number of effective K–12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educators. Why does this matter to those of us who teach English language arts and composition? NCTE’s “Teaching Composition: A Position Statement” provides the answer:

In the classroom where writing is especially valued, students should be guided through the writing process; encouraged to write for themselves and for other students, as well as for the teacher; and urged to make use of writing as a mode of learning, as well as a means of reporting on what has been learned. The classroom where writing is especially valued should be a place where students will develop the full range of their composing powers. This classroom can also be the scene for learning in many academic areas, not only English . . . . Teachers in all academic areas who have not been trained to teach writing may need help in transforming their classrooms into scenes for writing. The writing teacher should provide leadership in explaining the importance of this transformation and in supplying resources to help bring it about. [emphasis mine] (“The Scenes of Writing”)

We call this kind of interaction by many names, including reading and writing across the content areas, interdisciplinary learning, integrated curriculum, writing across the curriculum, and writing across the disciplines. What all of these undertakings have in common is their focus on collaboration among teachers who teach different subjects or who have different academic expertise. Here are some additional resources to help you get started on collaborations that can increase student success in every classroom:

• NCTE Position Statement on Interdisciplinary Learning, Pre-K to Grade 4
  
  
• Learning through Language: A Call for Action in All Disciplines from NCTE
  
  
• Statement on Multimodal Literacies from NCTE
  
  
• An Introduction to Writing Across the Curriculum from The WAC Clearinghouse
  
  
• Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines from the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
  
  
• Reading and Writing from Literacy Matters
  
  
• Reading in the Content Areas from Literacy & Learning
  
  
• Interdisciplinary Learning in Your Classroom from Concepts in the Classroom
  
  

Evidence of Literacy in Every Classroom

Dickie Selfe comments that participants at last week’s 21st Century Literacies Impact Conference discussed “the need for . . . groups to literally ‘see’ what it looks like to integrate these [literacy] skills into our curricula.” Demonstrating what literacy and literacy learning looks like is perhaps the most important challenge teachers face. The 21st century classroom is a changing space. Our job is to find ways to show the rich, dynamic learning that takes place there.

Projects like the cross-curriculum activity described in “The Mouse That Roared: Teaching Vocabulary with Source-Based Lessons” from English Journal document what a classroom engaged in literacy instruction looks like. When you look at the deltoid poster students composed, you can see the student thinking and the connections among content areas—art, science, and language arts. Perhaps we cannot photograph, videotape, or record all the literacy learning that takes place in the classroom, but there are still ways to document good teaching and 21st century literacy. We just need to spend time thinking about how students work and identifying the artifacts that will show every stakeholder what literacy looks like.