When educators think about what makes learning relevant to students, often they narrow their thinking to electives or career technical education. While these provide powerful opportunities for students to make relevant connections to their learning, they can also create authentic experiences in the core curriculum. In the San Juan Unified School District, educators are choosing to do this through an introduction to disciplinary literacy in secondary English/language arts and social science. Through the routines and structures that create a disciplinary literacy classroom, students are required to read, analyze, and annotate complex text; write about what they are learning; discuss their learning with their peers in multiple ways; chart their learning and display it in the classroom; read texts multiple times for multiple purposes; draw connections between texts in order to synthesize understanding; and learn significant content while simultaneously learning to think.