About this strategy
An important first step in introducing a new text to students is to leverage the resources that students bring to the classroom. By activating the prior knowledge of students — their context, history, prior readings and experiences — we can shortcut some of the process of explaining or explicitly teaching new ideas. Students make connections in three ways: text-to-self (links to personal experience), text-to-text (intertextual links), and text-to-world (connections to broader issues and events).
The four activities
Each activity includes detailed teacher instructions, student-facing instructions, a worked example, reflection prompts, and extension ideas in the book.
Connections Coding
Students annotate a text using symbols or colour coding to identify text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections. They add brief margin notes to explain each connection, then discuss their annotations in groups or as a class.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
Connections Text Walk
Students walk around the room visiting different stations, each featuring an extract from the central text. At each station they add annotations identifying connections, building on what previous students have written. The activity creates a layered, collaborative set of annotations.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
Context Walk
A variation on the Text Walk that uses contextual documents surrounding the central text — reviews, author biographies, historical documents, images — to deliberately engineer text-to-text and text-to-world connections for students who may not have encountered them naturally.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
Connections Map
Students create a visual map with the central text in the middle and connections radiating outward, organised by type (self, text, world). The map becomes a living document updated as students progress through the text, building a rich web of connections.
- Teacher instructions
- Student handout
- Worked example
- Reflect & Extend
Get the full activities
The book includes complete instructions, reproducible student handouts, real student examples, reflection questions, and extension ideas for all four activities.
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