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Thursday, December 5, 2019

Writing Unit 3: Analyzing to Make Connections - The New York Times

Welcome to our third writing unit of the school year. Below you will find a detailed description of each element, as well as ways to put them together to make your own custom unit. To learn more, visit our writing curriculum overview.

The goal of all of our writing units is to take the genres students practice in school and show them how those same formats are used outside of school, by professional writers communicating with real audiences. Our first unit, for instance, focused on narrative writing and introduced students to some of the ways personal stories have appeared across sections of The Times. Future editions will look at other familiar school genres like expository and argumentative writing.

This unit helps students understand something just as important but perhaps a bit less obvious: how journalists “connect the dots” to explain the significance of the things they report on by exploring their connections to a bigger picture — to other news, to trends, to larger ideas.

That’s a skill most teachers want their students to have, too. As your class reads “The Odyssey” — or studies biology, or learns about World War II — you want them to be thinking about the parallels and applications to our world today. Yet it’s the rare teacher who hasn’t experienced a “Why are we studying this anyway?” moment in the classroom, when the relevance of your curriculum eludes your students.

This unit invites students to consciously practice making those links, the kind that Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann first called Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self and Text-to-World connections. That is, we’ll be asking them to see themselves in what they study; to identify similarities between texts in terms of their themes, language, characters, ideas and more; and, finally, to articulate for themselves the relevance of what they study in school to the world outside it.

Like all our writing units, this one culminates in a contest that asks students to formalize their writing and thinking. Our 3rd Annual Connections contest invites them to take anything they’ve studied in school this semester and link it to any article in The Times to show how the two connect.

Here are some of the ideas previous winners explored:

As with all our units, we provide scaffolding along the way, via writing prompts, lesson plans, mentor-text guided practice, and of course, the project rules and rubric. So though you won’t find a pacing calendar or daily lesson plans, you will find plenty of ways to get your students reading, writing and thinking.

Here’s how the unit works in more detail:

Though linking academic content to its application and significance outside of school is second nature for anyone who writes curriculum, it might be a new habit of mind for some of your students. We hope these two questions will get them thinking:

Whether or not they’ll ultimately participate in our contest, we hope they’ll have fun answering these questions — and then enjoy reading the work of other students, commenting on it and maybe even hitting that “Recommend” button if they read a response they especially like.

All our prompts are open for comment by students 13 and up, and every comment is read by Times editors before it is approved.

1. Our resource “Making It Relevant: Helping Students Connect Their Studies to the World Today,” published in 2017, helps students brainstorm connections and make them visible. It offers two ways to get started:

  • Start with the world and connect it to your curriculum.

  • Start with your curriculum and connect it to the world.

For E.L.A. teachers, this lesson also offers a quick Bingo game in which students are invited to connect quotes from literature to something in the news right now — a one-class exercise that can get them used to thinking this way.

2. Our companion resource for social studies teachers, “The Past Is Present: Strategies for Bringing Current Events Into the Social Studies Classroom,” published in 2018, offers six approaches to help students make connections when studying history:

  • Connecting Through Essential Questions

  • Connecting by Theme

  • Connecting by Event

  • Connecting by Place

  • Connecting by Historical Text or Artifact

  • Connecting by People

3. Finally, we offer our long-running Text to Text series, some editions of which are on our new site and some of which are still on our old blog.

In this series, we took often-taught works of literature, history and science and paired them with current reporting and opinion, so that you can find, say, a lesson linking “The Metamorphosis” with an article headlined “How Social Isolation Is Killing Us,” or one connecting Syrian refugees today with Jewish refugees of the 1930s.

In other words, exactly what we’re asking students to do.

In our Mentor Text lesson plan to support this unit, we first show how a range of journalists from across sections of The Times regularly make comparisons and connections between things — whether to explain new concepts or to reframe old ones.

Then, we take five skills students need when they write any comparative analysis and use exemplary student work from our previous contests to show them that might be done. These skills include:

  • Focusing on a manageable idea given the scope of the assignment

  • Introducing the comparison and explaining why it matters

  • Transitioning effectively between texts and ideas

  • Acknowledging important contrasts

  • Concluding by both summing up and saying something new

You can find it all here, in “Writing Comparative Essays: Making Connections to Illuminate Ideas.”

By the end of the unit, your students will have read several mentor texts, practiced making different connections in writing and, we hope, thought deeply about how what they’re studying in school has relevance outside the classroom.

Now we invite them to do the same thing using a Times article — any article since 1851.

Here is how we introduce the contest:

So you’re studying the Civil War — or Shakespeare, or evolution or “The Bluest Eye.”

Why? What does it have to do with your life and the lives of those around you? Why should you remember it once you’ve turned in that paper or taken that test?

What relevance does it have today? What lessons can you learn from it that can be applied to the world outside of school? What parallels do you see between it and something happening in our culture or the news?

Essentially, we’re asking students to do what we do every day: connect what’s in The Times with what they’re learning in school.

All student work will be read by our staff, volunteers from the Times newsroom and/or educators from around the country. Winners will have their work published on our site and, perhaps, in the print New York Times.

An article we published in 2018 that describes some 44 replicable projects, “When School Gets Real: Teachers Connect Classroom Lessons to Current Events”

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Writing Unit 3: Analyzing to Make Connections - The New York Times
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