This article was originally published on the Fishtank Learning blog and was reprinted here with permission. The original post can be accessed here. Fishtank Learning is a free, standards-aligned curriculum developed and curated by educators. Highly rated on EdReports, the full math and ELA curricula can be viewed, shared, and downloaded free of charge.

Have you ever been in the middle of a read-aloud lesson, stopped to ask your students a comprehension question, and found 25 blank faces staring back at you? This is a common occurrence in many elementary school classrooms, especially when reading complex texts aloud to students.

Knowing that, come fall, students will have been out of school for even longer than usual, your initial inclination may be to read easier books, simplifying the text for students. But students can and should be engaging with complex texts at the beginning of the school year. This advice is echoed in Student Achievement Partners’ guidance for 2020–21 Priority Instructional Content, which advocates for keeping complex texts at the center of the ELA classroom even in this unprecedented year.

To avoid a classroom (or computer screen) full of blank stares, it’s important to anticipate what makes a text complex and prepare additional scaffolds and supports to ensure that students are able to access the text and build a deeper meaning. These supports will be especially important to aid students in re-engaging with learning after the disruption of the past several months.

What Makes a Text Complex?

As you consider an upcoming unit, you should first read the text through the lens of what makes the text complex at the holistic level. Then you should reread with an eye for what makes particular sections of the text—particularly sections connected to key questions—complex. We recommend using Achieve the Core’s text complexity rubric which breaks text complexity down into four main buckets: meaning, language, knowledge demands, and structure.

Let’s look at the text Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China from our 2nd Grade Cinderella Stories unit to explore how to articulate different aspects of complexity.

At this point in the unit, students have read a few different versions of Cinderella, so students may be able to notice key characteristics of a Cinderella story without closely analyzing the text. But whenever you read a text aloud to students, you should be pushing deeper, beyond the surface-level understanding. To facilitate this type of understanding, you will need to have a clear understanding of the complexities and nuances of the text. And you will need to be able to anticipate student gaps in understanding.

Start by thinking about which elements of complexity are present and which aren’t. The narrative structure of the text is straightforward and follows the chronological order of other Cinderella stories, and therefore will not present an additional barrier for most students. The central message, or meaning, is also similar to other stories from the unit, and can be inferred without a deep understanding of the text.

So what makes this text complex? One of the main features of complexity is the knowledge demands in the text. Yeh-Shen takes place in Ancient China, and one of the major events in the text is a festival. The New Year Celebration is an important holiday that brings families together, and was a place where young people could meet with the possibility of finding a spouse. At that point in time, marriages were often arranged, so it was not uncommon for families to attend a festival with hopes of arranging a marriage. But, marriages mainly happened within the same class, so it was very uncommon for the king to be interested in a poor, servant girl.

Another reason why the text is complex is the role of the illustrations in the text. The setting of the text is integral for developing characters, plot and mood. In order to fully understand the story, students need to closely “read” what is happening in the illustrations. One of the key questions of the lesson is, “Explain the significance of the illustrations. How do they help the reader better understand the story?” This key question is specifically designed to bring students’ attention to the complexity of the illustrations.

It can take practice to confidently identify the different features of text complexity. This resource defines each of the potential purposes of illustrations to help you consider what to look for in a text. The full version of our Qualitative Text Complexity Guide is coming very soon to a new iteration of our Teacher Tools.

Planning Student Supports

As you prepare to teach a unit, the time you spend with the texts will be most fruitful if you note along the way which elements of complexity appear where, and begin to strategize for how you will build the necessary scaffolds to support your students. We also recommend analyzing the Key Questions and Target Tasks of each lesson to determine how they might be challenging for your students, and adding your own supports.

Within the Fishtank ELA curriculum, we provide guidance on how to address the key features of text complexity in our Enhanced Lesson Plans, available with a Fishtank Plus subscription.

To support the knowledge demands for holistic understanding of Yeh-Shen, the Enhanced Lesson Plan suggests:

This guidance will help you introduce key content knowledge before reading the text.

Addressing the complexity of the text holistically, however, isn’t enough. Different sections of the text may have additional features of complexity. You may stop to ask a key question, and a particular knowledge, language, or structure demand may make that question particularly challenging.

If we look more closely at Yeh-Shen, we find a wealth of opportunities to dive deeper into the complexity of the text.

After reading this page, students are prompted with the following key question: “How does the King respond when he sees Yeh-Shen? Why?”

It would be easy for students to just say, “The king sends his men away.” While this is true, it misses the heart of what is really happening. This section is actually quite complex, and students might need additional scaffolds to answer the question fully.

• Knowledge Demands
  To understand why the king initially thinks that the girl should be thrown in prison as a thief, students need to understand what type of people attend the festival, and why she wouldn’t have attended the festival. Students might miss this judgement. If they do, you may prompt them: How does the king feel when he first sees Yeh-Shen? Why does he feel this way?
• Language Supports
  In this section of text, the author uses a lot of specific vocabulary to describe Yeh-Shen, the way the king feels, and his actions. To truly understand the king’s response, students need to understand what the specific description means. You may prompt with the following questions:
  • What does the author mean by “the sweet harmony of her features”? 
  • What does the author mean by “seemed so out of keeping with the rags she wore”? What is the author trying to say with this description? 
  • Why does the author include the word tattered? What is the author trying to emphasize about Yeh-Shen?
• Structure Supports
  It would also be easy to ignore the illustrations on this page, but in fact the illustrations add another layer of detail. In the illustration you can see the king pushing away his men with his hands, but in the background you also see the shadow of the fish. The author purposefully included this detail. You may prompt students: What do you notice about the illustration on page 22? How does this add to our understanding of the king’s actions?

With these scaffolds, students should be able to produce a more nuanced answer such as, “The king originally judged Yeh-Shen based on the way that she looked, but when he looked closer he was drawn into her beauty. The spirits of the magic fish were guiding the king to Yeh-Shen.”

These kinds of supports and scaffolds are provided throughout our Enhanced Lesson Plans, which are currently available with Fishtank Plus for our Kindergarten–5th grade ELA course.

Text Complexity in the Remote and Hybrid Classroom

To plan for remote or hybrid learning, we’d recommend going through the same process as outlined above: first determining what makes the entire text complex, then thinking about what features of complexity may interfere with comprehension at the question level, and finally designing the appropriate scaffolds and supports.

Once you’ve identified what makes the entire text complex, you should think about whether the features of complexity are things you can easily preview and introduce to students in a video before they listen to the text read aloud. If you can’t adequately introduce the text, don’t have students interact with it remotely right away. Wait and read the text during a synchronous learning experience, either in person or online.

If you decide that the features of text complexity are a fit for students to read the text at home, you should then look carefully at the key questions you ask students. Can the students answer the key questions without additional supports and scaffolds? If not, can the scaffolds easily be added remotely? If the answer is no to both, save those questions for a synchronous discussion.

With the right preparation, all students can and should have access to complex texts as they return to learning this fall. Explore our ELA curriculum to find more helpful guidance.

For more information on this topic, check out Match Fishtank’s blog post Teaching Complex Texts During a Complex Year.