Our Text Selection Framework

All the texts that appear in the Fishtank ELA curriculum align with our guiding principle, “Centering diverse, relevant, and rigorous texts.” We believe that every student, regardless of background and reading level, should read complex, engaging texts written in a variety of genres and voices, to highlight the richness of the human experience.  This framework provides more insight into exactly how we make decisions about which texts to include in our materials.

• Diverse - We strive to ensure our texts represent a wide range of genres and showcase a variety of perspectives, cultures, and ideas.  When we say we value diversity in our texts, we’re referring to three domains:
  • Diversity of genre - across a school year, within a grade band, and throughout the K-12 ELA experience, we strive to ensure students engage with texts in an intentional variety of subgenres.  For example, while every year students will engage with some form of narrative text, they’ll experience different subgenres of narrative text as they read historical fiction, memoir, graphic novels, fantasy, etc.  In addition, we strive to ensure that our materials reflect the balance of informational and literary texts required by the grade-level standards: 50/50 in K-5; 55/45 in 6-8; 70/30 in 9-12.
  • Diversity of voices - across a school year, within a grade band, and throughout the K-12 ELA experience, we strive to ensure students engage with texts that serve as “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors” (Bishop, 1990): ones in which they can see themselves, learn about others, or be inspired by. We often include multiple texts throughout a unit that represent different viewpoints or perspectives on a core unit topic, and strive to center the stories and perspectives of historically marginalized groups. Importantly, though we strive to include diverse voices from a variety of perspectives, we acknowledge that we cannot capture all the nuances in the human experience. 
• Diversity of modality - we strive to include multiple modalities in our units, including but not limited to: images, infographics, podcasts, video, etc. 
• Relevant - We choose texts that we believe will resonate with students. Such resonance comes from students’ ability to see themselves in the texts, as well as through the rich writing and discussion they can have about them.  We choose texts that offer these opportunities and that support students in building their knowledge of themselves, the world around them, and their power to create change. We value our texts’ ability to bring to life the essential knowledge and enduring understandings of each unit, and their ability to be paired with other texts to build knowledge and engagement of each unit topic.  We choose texts that are compelling and appropriate for the students' age. As much as possible, we ensure these texts are authentic: they come from authors writing for broad audiences, and are curated by our designers to support both the rigorous, grade-level standards and essential topics and themes in each unit.  Additionally, we strive to select texts in which the author is culturally connected to the content as much as possible, ensuring authenticity in the representations of the various identities and cultures found in the Fishtank ELA curriculum. 
• Rigorous - We strive to ensure that all of our texts are of appropriate grade-level complexity. This means we select texts that have grade-appropriate structure, language, meaning, and knowledge demands. To learn more about text complexity considerations, review the Understanding Text Complexity Teacher Tool; we also recommend engaging in the unpacking of each core unit text’s complexity within each Unit Launch.

Finally, as a curriculum developed for teachers, by teachers, and cognisant of the limited resources in many school districts across the country, we strive to ensure that our complete text package is affordable and easily available. We work directly with booksellers to stay on top of text pricing and availability. Additionally, we include embedded supplemental texts and link out to free resources.

• Grounded in Research & Guided by the Field.  We’ve leveraged curriculum design recommendations from the Common Core State Standards to ensure we are engaging students in developmentally appropriate, rigorous texts, balanced across the major genres, as the research recommends is best for each grade level.  In addition, we’ve consulted leading thinkers and recent research on text selection.  Some of the key texts that have guided our approach include: 
  • NYU Cultural Responsiveness Scorecard
  • Cultivating Genius by Gholdy Mohammad
  • The Reading Comprehension Blueprint by Nancy Lewis Hennessey 
  • “Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors” by Rudine Sims Bishop
  • Reading Diversity from Learning for Justice
• Driven by Unit Goals.  Ultimately, the texts we choose for each unit are driven by the end goals of the unit itself.  As designers, we ask ourselves what key knowledge, skills, and enduring understandings we want our students to learn, and then seek texts that develop these skills and ideas. 
• Responsive & Timely.  Fishtank ELA is committed to ensuring our text list is kept up to date.  We have internal processes to account for texts moving in and out of print, and can revisit units to account for contemporary research, ideas, or topics, or to address large-scale user feedback.  This does not mean our product is constantly changing!  It does mean that we value putting forth a consistent, high-quality, and up-to-date product.  Here’s how we think about it:
• Existing units in the recommended scope will be audited once yearly and, when needed, updated for changes in text availability.  Based on this yearly audit, existing units may also be refined to keep the unit aligned with the above set of values for our texts (i.e., the addition of a multimodal text for a unit that does not currently include one).
• New units will be designed to fill the gaps in our current offerings.  We will design new units to address knowledge and include voices not currently present in our existing units.