NAGC asked its 2024 Teachers Summit (held online February 13-14, 2024) speakers to share additional information about their presentations via the NAGC Blog. Michelle Hock and copresenter Leighann Pennington will be presenting on the topic of Rigorous Literature Instruction: Pairing Texts to Amplify Learning for Gifted Secondary Students on February 14 at 1:15 p.m. ET.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision a secondary English language arts (ELA) classroom full of students with glazed-over eyes, listening halfheartedly to their teacher explain symbolism in The Great Gatsby in a way that the students could have otherwise discovered by consulting SparkNotes. This scene, unfortunately, paints a common picture of secondary ELA classrooms, where gifted learners are often underchallenged by curriculum and instruction that are devoid of engagement and rigor. So how can we fix this? How can teachers ensure that diverse gifted learners – who have varied interests, identities, backgrounds, and experiences – are engaged by what they read? How can teachers challenge students to undertake rigorous literary analysis when, through basic Internet searches or the use of AI, students can access an overview or analysis of any assigned text? 

Although the answers to these questions may be complex, we can begin addressing them by leveraging the power of gifted learners’ natural inquisitiveness and desire to better understand themselves, others, and the world around them. We can also leverage best practices in ELA pedagogies to develop educational experiences that promote both engagement and rigor. To do this, we must start with several premises about literature instruction for gifted learners:

1. Students should have opportunities to see themselves represented in literature, which can involve identifying with characters, cultures, or other narrative elements. Identifying with texts helps students cultivate their sense of self, understand their place in the world, and become more invested in reading.
2. Students should be exposed to identities, cultures, experiences, eras, and ideas that are different from their own, providing them with windows into others’ worlds. This helps students develop perspective-taking skills needed for expanding their worldviews or critically analyzing their own ideas or assumptions. Exposure to new concepts can pique gifted learners’ curiosity and spark connection-making or deep engagement with topics of interest.
3. Students must be challenged to read texts that are within their zones of proximal development, both in terms of content and linguistic difficulty/complexity.
4. Students should be encouraged to make cross-disciplinary and cross-textual connections. Literature does not exist in a bubble; rather, texts are artifacts borne of a specific time, place, and culture, and may serve some greater historical, ideological, or sociopolitical agenda (either implicitly or explicitly). Texts, therefore, are in conversation with the world around them, and gifted learners should be encouraged to make these connections. 

With these premises in mind, teachers can begin designing engaging and rigorous learning experiences. One way to do this involves strategically pairing canonical texts and young adult literature (YAL). Although using a curriculum composed entirely of canonical texts has largely fallen out of favor, there are still compelling reasons to explore them with gifted children. Canonical works have endured for their exploration of universal and timeless themes, as well as for their powerful, unique, or innovative uses of language and text structure. To deny students access to these exemplary works of literature would be to deny them the opportunity to engage with sophisticated and complex works that have left indelible marks on society/culture at the global level. Further, as the field’s conception of “canonical works” expands as a result of the long-overdue recognition of literary brilliance among historically marginalized group (e.g., women, people of color, etc.), it is important to show students how the canon has diversified to include writers such as Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges (to name a few). 

Complementing canonical works with YAL, however, opens even more opportunities to increase engagement and rigor. YAL often features adolescent protagonists who are grappling with coming-of-age experiences, which can resonate with secondary students. Additionally, as a contemporary genre, YAL may speak more directly about issues that are of immediate interest to students. Further, it may be easier to find YAL texts that represent a range of identities, which can help teachers develop multicultural curricula. 

Despite the tremendous benefits of YAL, when read alone these texts may not provide gifted learners with the “stretch” that they need to further their learning. This isn’t to say that the content of YAL is not complex, nor that it can’t be taught in ways that challenge gifted children; rather, it’s an acknowledgement that these texts are designed to be more accessible (a huge benefit for reader engagement!), which means that not all YAL texts may adequately push gifted learners to build their capacity for reading and understanding more complex language. 

Text pairings, then, can provide “the best of all worlds,” where students are both engaged and challenged by literature. To plan for effective pairings, teachers should first identify a canonical work and YAL text that are “in conversation” with one another. For example, teachers could look for texts that address similar themes, take different approaches to examining the same topic, arrive at different conclusions about ideological or philosophical questions, etc. Then, teachers can design instructional units that challenge gifted learners to grapple with thought-provoking and complex content – not just a regurgitation of “traditional” readings of texts that students could find through an Internet search. (To get ideas for YAL texts to teach, consider visiting Dr. Bickmore’s YAL Wednesday blog or Southern Connecticut State University’s repository of YAL text information.)

Designing this type of unit could involve the synthesis of various approaches to framing instruction, including the use of cognitive rigor frameworks and critical literacy pedagogies. A commonly used cognitive rigor framework is Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK). Our aim for gifted students is to have them work towards analyzing literature at DOK levels 3 and 4 (the two most rigorous levels), which focus on strategic thinking and extended thinking, respectively. If we were to pair F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for example, with Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, we might give prompts such as:

• Critique Fitzgerald’s and Cisneros’s approaches to text structure. Justify your response with textual evidence. (DOK 3)
• Write a creative narrative depicting what a conversation about social class between Gatsby and Esperanza would look like. (DOK 4)

By challenging gifted students to make cross-text analyses, these upper-level DOK prompts provide them with increased instructional rigor. The pairing of these texts also promotes greater multicultural representation, which may bolster student engagement.
Critical literacy pedagogies can also be used to increase rigor, as this approach calls for students to problematize and interrogate elements of a text (e.g., ideological power structures undergirding the author’s purposes, absent voices/perspectives, etc.) that might otherwise go unexamined through “traditional” readings. For example, developing students’ critical literacies might involve posing questions such as:

•  Given the authors’ varied identities/experiences/historical eras, are you surprised that they’re tackling similar themes? Why might this be the case?
• How do the intersections of race/gender/class manifest in these texts, and what do they reveal about power?

Pairing texts has the power to amplify learning by increasing opportunities for engaging and complex literary analysis. Well-chosen pairings can broaden multicultural representation in curricula and have the power to maximize instructional rigor – all of which may help to make those scenes of English class boredom no longer a reality. To help you get started with strategic pairings of the canon and YAL, consider exploring the following resources:

• For information on how to differentiate YAL instruction, consider reading this sample book chapter from Teaching YA Lit Through Differentiation (Groenke & Scherff, 2010). 
• For an example of how you might “modernize” the teaching of a canonical text, refer to this article from Duke University’s TIP program. 

Reference
Groenke, S. L., & Scherff, L. (2010). Teaching YA lit through differentiated instruction. National Council of Teachers of English.

Michelle Hock is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Virginia's School of Education in the department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education. She holds both an Ed.D. and M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on gifted education from the University of Virginia, as well as an M.A. from Middlebury College in English Literature. Her teaching and research interests include preservice teacher education, gifted education, classroom assessment, and secondary English/language arts. Prior to her work at the University of Virginia, she served as a secondary English teacher in Pennsylvania.