times

The New York Times Learning Network has just begun a regular feature that I suspect is going to be very helpful to teachers — it’s called “Text To Text.”

Here’s how they describe it:

it is just what it sounds like: we’ll be pairing two written texts that we think “speak” to each other in interesting ways, and supplying a few questions and ideas for working with the two together.

One of the excerpts will, of course, always be from The New York Times — sometimes ripped from that week’s headlines, and other times from the archives.

The other excerpt will usually come from an often-taught literary, historical, cultural, scientific or mathematical text. We will also include visuals — photographs, videos, infographics or illustrations — that might be used as additional texts on the topic.

In addition, they also prepared free downloadable student hand-outs to use with the lessons!

They hope it will be helpful to teachers trying to apply “close reading” in their classroom (see The Best Resources On “Close Reading”).

So far this week, they’ve posted two of these “Text To Text” lessons:

Text to Text | Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg

Text to Text | ‘Where Do Your Genes Come From?’ and ‘DNA Double Take’

In the interest of full disclosure (and most readers already know), I write a weekly post for the Times on teaching English Language Learners. I can assure you that I haven’t been influenced in any way to write this post about their new feature….