Heather Lattimer provides practical, classroom-tested approaches to helping students access and critically respond to content-based texts.
Reading for Learning: Using Discipline-Based Texts to Build Content Knowledge
Technology That Powers Up Learning
By designing lessons to activate prior knowledge and linking these activities to reading and writing, teachers found that students were more engaged, that they learned more material more quickly, and that they more willingly incorporated reading into their lives.
A Failure of the Imagination
This article discusses the imaginative activities and assignments that teachers often assign that violate the text around which the lesson is focused and that mislead students about its meaning.
Finding the Thread: Character, Setting, and Theme
An annotated bibliography of books that exemplify the plot elements, character, setting, and theme. Includes guidelines on how to do a book talk.
Teaching Reading with YA Literature: Complex Texts, Complex Lives
This book is designed to help teachers develop their own version of YA pedagogy and a vision for teaching YA lit in the middle and secondary classroom.
Zora Neale Hurston in the Classroom: "With a Harp and a Sword in My Hands"
The book offers a practical approach to Hurston using a range of student-centered activities for teaching Hurston's nonfiction, short stories, and the print and film versions of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Sherman Alexie in the Classroom: "This is not a silent movie. Our voices will save our lives."
Provides high school teachers with teaching strategies, classroom activities, and student samples for teaching the works of Sherman Alexie.
Langston Hughes in the Classroom: "Do Nothin' till You Hear from Me"
Carmaletta M. Williams provides high school teachers with background on Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance as well as help in teaching Hughes's poetry, short stories, novels, and autobiography.
Judith Ortiz Cofer in the Classroom: A Woman in Front of the Sun
Carol Jago offers ways to teach the works of Judith Ortiz Cofer in the high school English classroom.
Amy Tan in the Classroom: "The art of invisible strength"
Offers high school teachers an activity-based approach to teaching the works of Amy Tan, especially The Joy Luck Club and The Opposite of Fate.
Alice Walker in the Classroom: "Living by the Word"
Carol Jago offers readers a handy guide for bringing this celebrated author's work into the classroom, including biographical information, ideas for literature circles using Walker's short stories, sample writing lessons using Walker's poems, suggestions for teaching The Color Purple, and a wealth of resources for further investigation of Alice Walker and her work.