Theme-Sets for Secondary Students: How to Scaffold Core Literature

No longer do secondary teachers have to feel married to the classics and divorced from their students. Theme-Sets for Secondary Students bridges the gap.
- Cris Tovani

So many reading and writing levels, so many different backgrounds and interests, and so many instructional needs. In the English classroom the need for differentiation has never been greater, yet at the same time students must all be working toward the same instructional and content-knowledge goals. Here's a new solution to this paradox: theme-sets.

By combining best classroom practices with theme-sets, you surround canonical texts with supporting literature and inquiry-based instruction to help students formulate and answer questions about the central theme of a core novel. Theme-Sets for Secondary Students illustrates how theme-sets can turn traditional high school literature study into an engrossing collaborative exploration of topics such as:

• migrant families (Grapes of Wrath)
• the African American experience (Their Eyes Were Watching God)
• the literature of war (Night)
• the bullying mentality (Lord of the Flies, Great Expectations, and The Scarlet Letter)
• utopian/dystopian societies (Fahrenheit 451).

Theme-Sets for Secondary Students shows you how to choose fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and other genres for theme-sets. It offers ways to obtain the books for your theme sets at low cost, as well as ideas on planning theme-based instruction, differentiating instruction using theme-sets, and sparking inquiry in all adolescents-even disinterested and struggling students. The discussion of each core text is accompanied by book lists, teaching points, inquiry activities that integrate the theme-sets with the core text, and suggestions for evaluating how learners are doing.

Theme-sets are a new and powerful way to differentiate your literature instruction and transform your teaching. Theme-Sets for Secondary Students is a powerful way to get started.