Tough Talk, Tough Texts: Teaching English to Change the World

Tough Talk, Tough Texts is a catalyst for reminding all of us who work with young people about the danger of throwing away the lifeblood of our students’ interior worlds and our own dreams of changing the world for the better…. Tough Talk, Tough Texts insists that we offer students books that are not simply larger, bulkier Hallmark cards but that instead challenge them to consider difficult issues, pushing them to think deeply and grow. Jimmy Santiago Baca

Strategic reading, critical examination, and civil discourse aren’t just for college preparedness―they are life skills. In Tough Talk, Tough Texts Cindy O’Donnell-Allen shares small-group instruction whose goal is to give kids the ability not merely to succeed academically, but to change their world.

This isn’t impractical idealism. Cindy shows step-by-step how to leverage challenging texts on challenging issues to maximize engagement and increase students’ agency in reading and in life. Best of all, she shares all the know-how and nitty-gritty you’ll need:

• scaffolds for whole-class and small-group discussions
• methods for grouping students, setting norms, and using response tools strategies that sustain independent discussions and document them
• multiple techniques for summative assessment
• reproducible resources such as handouts, assignment sheets, and scoring guides.

Tough Talk, Tough Texts is about helping students grow as readers as they use texts to answer the big questions about themselves, their peers, and their world. “With careful preparation,” writes Cindy O’Donnell-Allen, “students can learn to pose and discuss such questions, to listen and respond with empathy, and to implement strategies that will allow them to become more critical and strategic readers, writers, and thinkers.”

Tough Talk, Tough Texts extends Cindy O'Donnell-Allen's commitment to helping English teachers transform students' lives and, in turn, our world. She has pursued this goal in a variety of roles, including:

• more than a decade as a classroom teacher
• author of The Book Club Companion
• Associate Professor at Colorado State University and Director of its Writing Project
• former Co-Chair of the National Writing Project's Teacher Inquiry Communities Network.

Cindy and Tough Talk, Tough Texts are featured in the NWP Radio's  episode on teaching about the 10th Anniversary of the attacks on September 11th.

As an abandoned child and a runaway Jimmy Santiago Baca’s childhood was spent on the margins of society. In early adulthood he reverted again and again to a life of crime, eventually being sentenced to five years in a maximum-security prison. After years of hellish suffering on administrative segregation and in isolation, he emerges from prison a voracious reader and a skilled, self-taught writer. He miraculously discovers a deep attachment to poetry that becomes his saving grace.

Now an accomplished and celebrated author, Baca is the recipient of many honors including the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and for his memoir, A Place to Stand, he received the prestigious International Prize. In 2006 he won the Cornelius P. Turner Award, a national award that annually recognizes one GED graduate who has made outstanding contributions to society in education, justice, health, public service, and social welfare.

Devoting his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship, Baca has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities. In 2005 he created Cedar Tree, Inc., a nonprofit foundation dedicated to helping others improve their lives through education.

Other books by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Poetry
Selected Poems/Poemas Selectos
Rita and Julia
Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande
Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande
C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans
Healing Earthquakes
Que Linda La Brisa/How Beautiful the Breeze Is
Immigrants in Our Own Land
Black Mesa Poems
Martin and Meditations on the South Valley

Short Stories and Essays
Adolescents on the Edge / Stories from the Edge
Working in the Dark
The Importance of a Piece of Paper
Breaking Bread with Darkness

Novel
A Glass of Water

Memoir
A Place to Stand

Film
Blood In/Blood Out
Late Blossoms
Lost Voices
Moving the River Back Home