Lexile... and Beyond!
Examining text complexity through multiple lenses

What are we asking of our students?
Are we even aware of how the texts we put in front of students support grade-level mastery of standards? When was the last time your PLC looked at the next novel unit and collaboratively assessed the qualitative and quantitative elements of text-complexity for each of your potential texts? While there may be individuals who do this in pockets around the city, how can we support a systematic exploration of this topic?
Equity through curriculum means ensuring that all students, not just some students, are expected to wrestle with these complex texts and perform at the cognitive level of the standard. This will take support, scaffolding, and intentional planning, but our first step in ensuring access is to know for ourselves what we are putting in front of students.
Resources to Explore

The Association for Middle Level Education explores the 5 plagues of developing readers.
A tool to assess not only complexity of texts but the perspectives that are represented, the bias that is explored, and how well our students can see themselves in literature we use. TeachingTolerance.org
