I love the emphasis on planning out student experiences, purposefully. I think students (and all readers) are constantly comparing and making connections between texts, naturally. It is our job as teachers to provide and scaffold quality experiences in doing this, so that students will continue to grow.

Pairing texts is a powerful way to, in the moment, connect new information to known information. The cognitive stretching is the goal of all teachers and pairing texts is a great way to accomplish this. This strategy also provides students with lots of opportunities to engage in other common core standards.

I have paired two text together before and completed a closed reading with them. I used an excerpt from Moby Dick and one from Moby Duck, to compare and contrast the obsessions that came from the whiteness of the whale and the yellowness of the duck. What I am most interested in, is the concept of pairing an easier text which will then be used to help students understand a more difficult one. I used the texts simultaneously as opposed to using the first to build toward the second. I have not encountered my "Moby" assignment this year; I may have to dig it out and take a fresh approach to the concept of paired texts. Thank you for the insight!

Will, you may want to have a look at the PARCC passage selection document to the right in Supporting Materials. Starting on pg. 11 of the doc, you will see the process PARCC uses for selecting texts to pair. Hope it helps!

What is meant by having "two texts talk to each other"?