Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self, Text-to-World

This strategy works best with a text that raises universal themes that might resonate with students’ own experiences and with material they have studied previously. Teachers often give students their own copy of the text so that they can mark it up, although this is not required.

The accompanying handout to this strategy provides you with sample questions that you can give students to guide them through this activity. The questions in the directions are general, but you can make them specific to the material your class is studying. For example, you might ask students to connect what they read to specific texts or to events you have studied earlier in the school year.

Students gain a deeper understanding of the text, of their classmates, and of the world around them when they have the opportunity to discuss their responses with peers. Students can share their responses with a partner (see the Think-Pair-Share teaching strategy), in small groups (see the Assigning Roles teaching strategy), or as part of a larger discussion (see the Fishbowl teaching strategy).

If you have limited time, you can give students the option of writing about one connection they have found between the text and another text, their lives, or the larger world.

Social maps are a visual way of showing relationships between people, but they can also be used to show relationships between ideas and events. An extension of this activity would be to have students draw the connections they find between a text and other ideas, events, or experiences. Students can work on these maps in groups, noting the relationships among their responses.