Racially and Culturally Inclusive Language Arts for Middle School

In this visual strategy, students divide vocabulary words into parts and draw illustrations to represent the separate meaning of each part.

Students learn the meaning of vocabulary words by writing the word in multiple ways. Students write guided paragraphs about words from the central text then share their writing with peers.

These surveys ask students what they know or how they feel about specific words in the text they are reading.

In this semantic feature analysis strategy, students use a grid to show how vocabulary words relate to one another and to conceptual frameworks (e.g., masculine versus feminine).

Students use this tool to identify a word’s meaning, its parts and its opposite. After organizing the information on an illustrated flashcard, students practice using the word in a sentence.

Students predict the meanings of vocabulary words before reading and confirm the accuracy of their predictions during and after reading. Students identify context clues from the text and revise their definitions accordingly.

This contextual redefinition strategy encourages students to use the structure and context of words to predict their meanings. Students arrive at the definition through exposure to increasingly rich clues.

A tableau is a representation of a scene or picture by people posing silently without moving. In a vocabulary tableau, a group of students use their bodies to create a frozen picture of a vocabulary word.

Students use a concept map to organize their vocabulary learning. This tool requires students to define words, find examples, draw on prior knowledge and connect related concepts.

Challenge the Text helps students ask and answer their own text-dependent questions by taking multiple perspectives and uncovering assumptions and biases within the text.

In reading against the grain students analyze the dominant reading of a text and engage in alternative or "resistant" readings. Resistant readings scrutinize the beliefs and attitudes that typically go unexamined in a text, drawing attention to the gaps, silences and contradictions.

Shared reading combines aspects of guided reading and read-aloud strategies. During shared reading, a teacher or proficient student reads the text aloud, pausing at pre-selected moments to discuss content and analyze the text. This strategy facilitates close reading of a complex text in small or whole group settings.

Readers must refer back to the central text to answer text-dependent questions and provide evidence from the reading to support their answers. Students provide accurate, relevant and complete evidence. To do this well, students will often need to re-read the text several times. This approach privileges the text over prior knowledge, personal experience and pre-reading activities.

This task helps students consider if the text is a window or a mirror through practicing literacy skills and using technology.

A strategy to introduce the anti-bias framework into group discussion and textual analysis. Students respond to and pose questions from the four anti-bias domains: identity, diversity, justice and action.