Teaching Challenging Texts: Fiction, Non-fiction, and Multimedia - Hardcover

Teaching Challenging Texts takes on an nearly insurmountable goal, seeking to blend a powerful commitment to adolescent-centered teaching with the demands of standards-based accountability and the needs of pragmatic educators. This book succeeds in its goal and should provide thoughtful educators with an invaluable resource as they build classrooms where students and texts matter. -- Paul Thomas Adolescents deserve to have their teachers read Teaching Challenging Texts. It's filled with practical ideas for middle and high school teachers as they consider the ways in which students can be engaged in authentic learning tasks. The texts used as exemplars are worthy, complex, and relevant to the lives of adolescents, and students everywhere will appreciate the lessons they receive from their teachers who read this book. -- Doug Fisher, Ph.D., professor at San Diego State University and author of "Text Complexity" (2012) and "Teaching Students to Read Like Detectives" (2011) We teachers face our toughest adversary ever: Technology that is driving our students away from reading, enjoying and learning much from the great bounty of literature that provides the depth and breadth of essential knowledge. Baines & Fisher's challenging book is a must read for all of us to become better teachers of this new generation. -- Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., former President of the American Psychological Association, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, author of "The Time Paradox" (2009) and "The Lucifer Effect" (2008) To read Teaching Challenging Texts is to have a warm conversation with colleagues over a cup of coffee about how to teach in the visual-verbal world in which we all live. A breakthrough set of teaching strategies for a new age. -- Mike Angelotti, teacher, poet, artist

Teaching Challenging Texts shows how to increase reading comprehension and enhance student engagement, even with the most challenging texts. Every chapter features ready-to-use, research-based lessons, replete with explicit instructions, handouts, Common Core correlations, and assessments. "Exploring the Future" features fiction by George Orwell, Suzanne Collins, and William Golding; nonfiction by Philip Zimbardo, Stephen Pinker, Abraham Lincoln, Jared Diamond, Dan Ariely, and Ray Kurzweil; images from several films, an old television commercial; and classical and contemporary music. "Understanding the Power of One" features fiction by Victor Hugo and Lori Halse Anderson; nonfiction by Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Edith Hamilton; a young adult book on archaeology, an animated film from Walt Disney, and an episode from Saturday Night Live. An extensive list of free resources and correlations to the Common Core allow teachers to "teach on the cheap." Teaching Difficult Texts brims with "relevant and robust" lessons for a new generation.