Creatively Pairing Texts to Support Students’ Engagement With Reading

“I don’t like to read” is a refrain that comes back every year in the classroom. Sometimes this statement comes from a student who has a demonstrated history of trying to escape English class assignments, and sometimes it comes from a “high flyer” who has been taking advanced courses for years.

So, what do we do to change this narrative and engage students? I don’t have the golden answer, but I have a few ideas, including artful pairing of texts.

I’m always working through the challenge of engaging students with reading. With so many screens, fast images, and distractions, as well as the changes in tastes and times, this is always a work in progress. In this post, I’ll share some of the pairings I’ve found most successful as I continue to reimagine my practices.

Finding the Pairings

Sometimes, text pairing is a matter of aligning curriculum with colleagues and finding creative ways to explore content. At other times, teachers might note that a theme or author move matches up well, or I might decide to fill in a missing gap in what students need to see in terms of a mentor text. Sometimes, it’s student led, or a colleague will recommend a work that connects well.

I don’t shy away from experimenting with different works when it comes to pairing texts, especially for students who are engaged in writing craft work. Pairing a text like Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein with Jericho Brown’s poem “Dear Dr. Frankenstein,” for example, helps elevate the idea of a monster from one novel to a more contemporary context to explore deeper ideas like the ethics of how we interact in daily life, as well as the complexity of how we see ourselves and others.

A poem can deliver the ideas in a few words as an invitation to the wider expanse of chapters that are contained in the novel.

Pairing a Classic With a New Classic

This past semester, my students wanted to read something real. They were highly interested in events that have shaped the world as we know it. My first go-to was Night, by Elie Wiesel. While this is by no means a new tale, it’s one that I feel strongly about in terms of its continued importance as part of history and as part of the greater human story of being decent to one another and resisting harmful policies.

My students read this with great interest, and as we approached the end, I wanted to give them the opportunity to read a newer classic grounded in real events. So, we settled on Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. I’d like to note that this recommendation also came from my next-door teaching neighbor.

As we read through these texts as well as reading choices that followed, I continued to bring both of these readings back to the forefront. Given the length of this book, the use of The Kite Runner led to a subsequent pairing across media.

Other Ways to Pair Texts

The number of graphic novel adaptations continues to rise, with The Kite Runner among them. The use of the graphic novel allowed me to attend to matters of story, revisit key chapters in the novel, and include additional design features for analysis and conversation. To do this, we sometimes read the novel first and then compared it with the graphic novel; at other times, sections of the novel or graphic novel took central attention. This was a back-and-forth comparison, and reading across texts and other video texts and online images (i.e., historical photographs, author interview segments) helped my students build more schema and depth of knowledge as we read.

In so many ways, the age of multiple screens and media storytelling has opened up possibilities in the classroom.

Sometimes, creative writers infuse nonfiction elements or ideas in poetry, as in prose poems and short (“flash”) nonfiction pieces that are only 300–500 words. I think there’s value in exposing students to the traditional, perennially assigned works and reading innovative work that is being published now to keep the idea of text and narrative work alive.

An element of theme in a nonfiction passage, such as loss, grief, and personal vision in Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize speech, can be paired with a short animated film like the Oscar-nominated short Negative Space. Additionally, a classically assigned poem like Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” can be paired with the narcissism we see in Oscar Isaac’s portrayal of Victor in Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 Netflix adaptation of Frankenstein.

These are both pairings I’ve made in the past six months of classroom instruction.

When to Persist With a Text—and When to Abandon

When it comes to choosing class and individual readings, it is always a dynamic and interactive experience for me. This is part of what makes English language arts teaching my joy spot. In terms of the question of when to abandon and when to persist with this work, reading the room is part of this art, but soliciting input through conversations and small group conferences is also an important part of my practice.

Having conversations with students about what they are reading for pleasure through conferencing is one way of approaching this, and it can be an effective way to get to know students better and to inform curricular choices. Another way is to pulse check with what they’re writing or responding to in small group discussions. I do this for about five minutes with each group, for a total of about 20–25 minutes of class as students are working.

I sometimes find myself answering the same question from group to group, and this is a quick qualitative message that I should share a text connection that supports learning or illustrates what a student is wondering about. Sometimes I have a pairing ready, and at other times I brainstorm this later on my own or with colleagues.

I find that student inquiry is a vital part of this process, along with a teacher’s drive to share contemporary voices and enrich the curriculum. Additionally, my colleagues provide knowledge and experience in my “What have you tried with [this book]?” or “What do you use to teach [this topic]?” conversations.

While some readers (and teachers) want to persist with a book simply because they began the first few pages, I embrace the process of tasting many texts and then finding the one that feels most appetizing.