C hildren know that a pictogram of a man or woman indicates a restroom before they can read the words men or women. They easily manipulate icons on touch screens, interpreting their meaning often before they can explain it in words. We live in a visual world yet don't always recognize the role images can play in engaging and supporting our students. Brenda's comment is a fourth grader's enthusiastic reaction to a standards-based geology curriculum that used photography alongside traditional teaching strategies. In her classroom, photography supported science and literacy learning for acquiring knowledge and demonstrating understanding of new concepts-that is, for both receptive and productive purposes.We wanted to explore photography's role in science and disciplinary literacy teaching because we believed it had the potential, especially in inquirybased learning, to "enhance what is possible by amplifying what teachers are able to do… [and] by extending what students are able to produce as a result of their investigations" (Schiller & Tillett, 2004, p. 401). Because students are comfortable making photographs using both disposable and inexpensive digital cameras and camera phones, photography was a natural way to integrate visuals for teaching and learning. We intentionally chose to look at how photographs could help students construct multimodal Marva Cappello is an associate professor at

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Introduction of the Common Core State Standards and assessments like the synthesis performance task pose new challenges for secondary English teachers. As students of all ability levels engage with complex text and in tasks that target higher level cognitive skills, teachers need strategies to support their understanding. This article describes development and implementation of a differentiated unit for a synthesis performance task in three ninth‐grade English classes. The unit's summative assessment required students to evaluate the credibility of survivor accounts of the tragic events atop Mt. Everest in 1996, select the most credible account, and support their argument with evidence from multiple sources. This article includes descriptions of how the unit was differentiated for students of varying skill levels, examples of student work to illustrate how all were able to complete the synthesis task, and reflections for future practice.