R.CCR.9–that’s the ninth College/Career Readiness anchor
standard within the Reading strand of the Common Core State
Standards (CCSS) for ELA / Literacy–reads as follows: Analyze
how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order
to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors
take. There are two key teacherly tasks in preparing to teach
this standard. Choosing multiple related texts For R.CCR.9,
texts can be related topically or thematically. Let’s look at a
few examples of how this might look: TOPICALLY LINKED, MULTI-
GENRE For example, when reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart, my ninth grade students and I also examine Rudyard
Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” and this coming school
year I’m going to add open letters to and from King Leopold II
during Belgium’s imperial heyday (taken from The Human Record:
Sources of Global History since 1500, by Andrea Overfield).
Altogether, these texts will consist of various genres, and some
of them will contain starkly contrasting