range for high school; many of the most well-known and highly regarded historians (such as Jared Diamond and Henry Louis Gates Jr.) are beyond the complexity as well, though more popular writers of society and culture, such as Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns) and Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City), tend to fall at the lower and middle ends of the range. Given the surfeit of quality texts, it is incumbent on social studies teachers to attend to volume and range, offering students repeated opportunities to view both primary and secondary sources of historical phenomena—speeches, essays, autobiographies, visual media, historical fiction, and so on. As with English, social studies teachers should provide many chances for students to read and respond to five-hundred- to one-thousand-word excerpts from secondary sources that reflect the readings students will see on the PARCC, SBAC, and ACT; these should be tied to—or logically connected with—the focus of study at the time of the reading.
Given these demands, it is essential that social studies teachers have a long-term vision for infusing their curriculum with literacy; this requires a consistent structure for how students engage with complex texts in the classroom. Some suggestions:
о Read a book-length text each semester—For example, you could choose to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Haley, 1965) or a collection of essays, first-hand accounts, and historical analyses of the Civil Rights era. Truly excellent historical fiction, such as Cormac McCarthy’s (1985) Blood Meridian or E. L. Doctorow’s (1975) Ragtime, is also appropriate.
о At least once a quarter, if not during each module or unit, include an anchor text that provides a conceptual or theoretical foundation from which students can analyze and evaluate the historical phenomena they are studying—Examples include Arthur Schlesinger’s (1986) The Cycles of American History, Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, and Jared Diamond’s (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel. Students should first study excerpts from such texts so they understand the core tenets of the argument, and then they should apply the key ideas or arguments of the text to examples from the textbook or other readings.
о For each topic or area of study, develop an inquiry by using a balance of primary, secondary, and textbook sources—For example, a U.S. history course could address westward expansion by looking at primary sources of the era, such as John Gast’s painting American Progress and John O’Sullivan’s (1839) “The Great Nation of Futurity” editorial, and secondary sources from a century later, such as Anders Stephanson’s (1995) Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, and Henry Nash Smith’s (1970) Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth.
The website Reading Like a Historian from the Stanford History Education Group (http://sheg.stanford.edu/rlh) is a valuable resource for social studies teachers when identifying primary sources.
Science
The challenge for science teachers when selecting and integrating complex texts into their curriculum is addressing the literary side of writing in their discipline. With their technical vocabularies and formal tones, the most common texts of the science classroom—textbooks, lab reports, and technical accounts—are often complex because they are, to borrow a word commonly used by science educators, dense with information and technical language rather than because they feature sophisticated arguments, explanations, or uses of language. Teachers need to make a very intentional effort, then, to locate and implement texts that help students analyze, synthesize, and evaluate (per the standards), and not just comprehend; they’ll also need to think critically about how to pair doing science with reading science, as the CCSS do not separate the two.
The following four shifts in science instruction tied to the Common Core standards will help science teachers integrate appropriate texts.
1. Read and review texts during laboratory exercises: At least three of the Reading standards for science (RST.9–10.3, RST.9–10.6, and RST.8) specifically address conducting or evaluating procedures and experiments in response to what is written in a text. Others (CCRA.R.7, CCRA.R.9) discuss integrating multiple sources of data, from texts and experiments, into solving problems (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). But simply reviewing a list of steps is not enough—the expectation is that students will read on-level material when engaging in the doing of science, so students will need exposure to the foundational logic of the experiment or question under investigation, such as via the original study (for example, Gregor Mendel’s [1865] “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” for an introductory focus on genetics) or the methods section of a scholarly article. Such pieces are also good for addressing vocabulary standards.
2. Increase the complexity of current event or real-world application articles: Science teachers commonly share readings that relate to current or recent areas of study. These often are discovered by chance, from not particularly intellectually charged sources, and are utilized in a spur-of-the-moment fashion. Sourcing deliberately from more intellectually rigorous materials, however, is a logical way of helping students use textual evidence (CCRA.R.1) and summarizing complex concepts (CCRA.R.2). The websites of Science, Discover, and Seed magazines all feature articles on the latest science news that are written for the scientific community. Editorial and feature reporting in the New York Times or the Economist may also suffice. Such works are equivalent to the ideas and rhetorical complexity of the texts students are likely to see on the PARCC, SBAC, and ACT assessments.
3. Provide frequent opportunities for students to understand the core questions, arguments, and advances of key scientific concepts: To integrate complex texts more seamlessly into your curricula, focus reading opportunities on the intellectual development and complexities of key concepts, not on their historical background or practical uses. What makes the writing of scientists like E. O. Wilson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Stephen Jay Gould more literary is their inquiry into what is known and unknown in science and their interest in the ethical and philosophical implications of such knowledge. Texts of this quality are particularly good for defining central ideas (CCRA.R.2.), defining technical vocabulary (CCRA.R.4), considering the author’s purpose (CCRA.R.5, CCRA.R.6.), and evaluating arguments and explanations (CCRA.R.2). Because such works tend to be rich in thought and intellectually heavy, they need not be long in length. A brief excerpt, sometimes only a paragraph or two, may suffice (NGA & CCSSO, 2010).
4. Synergize texts: Reading anchor standards seven and nine ask for students to synthesize information from multiple kinds of texts—prose, visual texts, and quantitative texts—and science teachers can respond by constructing tasks centered on analyzing a range of texts that help students solve a scientific problem (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). For example, in a biology or environmental science class, students might study population decline by reading a theory or technical account of the phenomena and then, using quantitative data and an article on a particular species’ decline, identify the cause of the decline, compare it with other species or scientific explanations, and suggest or evaluate solutions. Reading a range of texts—from a complex explanation of theory to a chart to a newspaper article—and engaging in exploration and analysis of data emulates the work scientists do when attacking problems in their field.
Next Steps: Three Implications for Instruction
Looking at the suggestions for all three content areas, it’s clear that students need to be reading authentic texts—the same kinds of texts professionals in the discipline study and rely on when posing questions and solving problems. They also need to be engaged in authentic tasks—the same kind of problems that professionals in the discipline experience or attempt to solve. Rigor, after all, is not just upping the quality and complexity of the content but also equally enhancing the quality and complexity of how teachers and students engage in it. Thus, three implications for instruction are clear: you must (1) ensure text quality is high, (2) ensure reading is a practice, not an act, and (3) make practice deliberate.
