Text Analysis Toolkit

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This toolkit aims to support educators in the process of selecting and analyzing texts based on complexity and cultural relevance. The resources focus on tools for reflecting on the identities of educators and the students they serve, analyzing texts with multiple lenses, and considering implications for use in their specific context. The resources here may support your process of text selection, or they may be embedded into your lesson preparation process for pre-selected texts (with or without instructional materials). You’ll look at each text as it stands alone, but you should also think about how the text fits into the unit you are teaching and how this text may impact instructional decisions across the year.

Text Analysis Toolkit

Know Yourself, Know Your Students

A stand-alone reflection resource meant to support educators in thinking about their own identities and those of their students. Use at strategic points over time (for example the beginning of the school year and after each semester) to continually reflect.

Initial Considerations for Complexity and Cultural Relevance

A resource to use after a first read of a text to determine whether it’s usable for the classroom and to begin thinking about complexity and relevance. This includes determining whether a text should not be used or whether the teacher will need to be thinking carefully about attending to cautions in the text when using with students.

Expanded Qualitative Analysis

A tool to analyze features of complexity and cultural relevance more deeply in order to prepare for instruction. The rubric portion of the tool comes from the qualitative complexity rubrics that were published alongside the college- and career-ready standards, and the wording has not been changed. The additions around challenges, opportunities, and questions to ask yourself are all new for this resource. There is one version for literary texts and another for informational texts.

Text Analysis: Additional Supports

These resources are designed to further facilitate your work with text analysis, help you make the case for why text analysis through multiple lenses is important, and dig more deeply into the elements of culturally relevant literacy instruction.

Resource Roundup

This one-page curated collection of resources will help you:

Facilitate reflections and conversation about race, identity, and bias
Get to know your students
Understand culturally relevant pedagogy
Dig more deeply into text selection and use
Identify multicultural texts

Advice from Educators

Toolkit Advice from Educators

Educator Chat: The Toolkit’s Impact

Lesson Examples

Sample text analysis and planning guides to support instruction of anchor texts that are both complex and offer opportunities for culturally relevant pedagogy.

Alejandria Fights Back!

Grades: 3-5

Alejandria Fights Back! Image
Your Name Is a Song

Grades: 3-5

Your Name Is a Song Image
When I Was Growing Up

Grades: 9-10

Nellie wong when i was growing up

By: Student Achievement Partners Published July 25, 2024
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