Teaching Challenging Texts

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