When teachers at an urban middle school received a professional development grant to design challenging seminars, researchers explored the dynamics of curriculum development toward literacy integration and examined students' responses. As they prepared to implement Common Core Standards, teachers selected Paideia seminars as an approach to integrating literacy instruction across content areas. Teachers developed challenging seminars by studying the standards that would become official the following year, selecting texts for shared seminars, writing questions to encourage dialogue, developing assessments, and analyzing data. By organizing lesson activities that scaffolded understanding, teachers provided the background knowledge students needed to make sense of difficult text and complex ideas. Data from observations, work samples, and interviews showed how participants developed seminars that nurtured deeper levels of thinking through reading, listening, speaking, and writing in their content areas. Results demonstrated that students made sense of difficult texts through collaborative conversations. Survey responses indicated that most students were very positive about their experiences. Collaborative discussions created opportunities for students to understand new aspects of concepts, identify relationships among these aspects, and create generalizations. An analysis of student essays documented evidence of understanding complex ideas, connections between ideas, and critical judgments. While limited by sample size and context, results illustrated the power of learning experiences that were challenging and relevant, especially when literacy was integrated with content instruction.