Text Sets

A common refrain for teachers all over is “I don’t have enough time.”  It’s difficult enough to cover the skill-sets, canonical classics, contemporary works deemed “important” and different genres in a curriculum without throwing in the added wrench of trying cover those subjects well, in full, necessary detail.  Tovani argues throughout Do I really Have to Teach Reading? that curriculums should be slowed down and texts should be given the focus and time they deserve.  Text sets serve as a method of providing context and historical background to texts that struggling readers might otherwise have trouble understanding.

Text sets are, basically, packets containing additional information about the subject, time period or author of a text.  Tovani’s text set for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird serves as a good example: “To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book, but it is often wasted on the young… Interesting tidbits about the author, Harper Lee, are included as well as pictures and information about Jim Crow laws and the civil rights movement” (Tovani 47).  This may seem like common sense, a strategy that is reflexive to most teachers.  Of course students need context and extra material to understand the nuances of the literature they read.  What Tovani has done, however, is normalize these extra pieces of information.  Again, she lifts the veil from her teaching in a way that makes students feel more at home, feel like text sets are a part of their reading routine and not just extra work the teacher has assigned.

The normalization of text set usage is described on pages 47 and 48 in detail, including how Tovani would design text sets for non-English subjects and how text sets work to explain more difficult English texts like those written by Shakespeare or Homer’s The Odyssey.  The Homer unit is a great example of turning material that’s too hard into a “just-right book” (49).  “The text set contains more readable versions of The Odyssey, including picture books, as well as books that have information about Greek gods, monsters, and heroes.  Information about the literary structure of the epic poem, maps of Ancient Greece, and related articles from nonfiction sources such as magazines and newspapers round out this set” (47). 

Tovani’s use of text sets to explicate the issues students encounter when attempting difficult texts work because she has made them part of the routine of the class, essentially making the text set a part of the text.  While she may cover fewer books in her class, she can rest assured that she has covered her texts more closely and thoroughly than teachers who rush through a smorgasbord of texts.