The instructional materials for Grade 7 partially meet expectations for indicator 2a in that texts are organized around a topic/topics and/or themes (as is appropriate for grades 6 and up) to build students' ability to read and comprehend complex texts independently and proficiently as they build knowledge. However, there are missed opportunities for students to read closely, as students’ engagements are often relying solely on students’ reads, rather than having strong guidance to support a comprehensive depth of understanding.

Texts within this anthology require students to focus on variations around the theme of "choice." Interrelated texts, film, and independent reading assignments focus on different aspects of this shared theme. Students learn from Nelson Mandela's autobiography about his choice to fight for desegregation in South Africa. Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," the novel Tangerine, Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" and a drama by Shakespeare are representative examples of texts that show students the choices real and imaginary characters make and how those choices affect their lives. However, many questions about the characters are superficial and do not dive in to the deeper learnings available by these rich texts.

The online Close Reading Workshops include strategies to support students in determining what each text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from what it does not say explicitly. Should the teacher not engage students explicitly with these materials as they read, students may not incorporate the strategies and supports appropriately or in context.

Reading, questions, writing tasks, and speaking and listening activities all revolve around the study of choices made and how they impact society while growing knowledge about subtopics within each unit. Students have ample opportunity during collaborative discussions to share connections between concepts taught in class and their independent reading, and are provided opportunities to demonstrate new knowledge and stances on the themes and topics in culminating activities. There is little teacher support to redirect or reteach should students misunderstand core work or need comprehension support.

The materials for Grade 7 partially meet the expectations of indicator 2b as most texts and materials require students to analyze the language, key ideas, details, craft, and structure of individual texts. Coherent sequences of questions and tasks support students' development in skills around how to analyze the components of text, enabling them to navigate the content and draw conclusions in order to articulate what they are learning and engage with the text.

For most texts, students analyze key ideas and details, structure, and craft, author's word choice, and language choices. The program includes questions that support study of detailed language and word choices (such as work with verbs and pronouns) as well as questions that support students' learning and considering broader craft and style components (such as using syntax for effect and identifying cohesive sentences). In most texts, students are provided opportunities to analyze language and author's word choice as they read, through sidebar word meaning and word connection lessons and questions that prompt them to interact with text to find examples of figurative, sensory and vivid language, as well as roots and affixes and other components of language. However, the support for teachers and students should students misunderstand is minimal. Additionally, students' engagement with rich content vocabulary beyond literary terms is weak.

The questions and tasks provided for students to learn about craft, style, and engage in study of key ideas have an extensive focus on surface- level elements of the text and rely heavily on student interpretation. There is little teacher support should students misunderstand or need further direct instruction.

An example from Unit 4, activity 4.5 illustrates the program’s treatment of questions and tasks with this indicator:

After reading Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” students are provided a short series of questions:

• In one or two sentences, summarize the story of “The Raven.”
• What is the dominant image of [“The Raven”]? How do the connotative associations with this image and other diction choices fit with the dark and eerie tone Poe is trying to create?
• You already know about end rhyme, the most common form of rhyme. In “The Raven,” Poe also makes use of internal rhyme. What examples of internal rhyme do you see in the first two stanzas?
• How does the poem’s structure or organization contribute to its meaning?
• How does Poe use other poetic devices to develop the poem?

Student prompts are accompanied by possible responses for the teacher to view:

Student prompt:

• What is the dominant image of [“The Raven”]? How do the connotative associations with this image and other diction choices fit with the dark and eerie tone Poe is trying to create?
• “The dominant image is a raven perched and repeating “Nevermore.” Because ravens are large and black, and in this case appear in the night, they are often associated with ominous omens. The raven’s repetition of the word ‘Nevermore’ also seems particularly eerie and foreboding.”

The teacher is provided a possible response:

The writing at the end of the lesson includes these questions:

“Based on your understanding and the information you created above, write a paragraph that explains the purpose and effect of ‘The Raven.’

Be sure to:

• Use the summary you wrote.
• Include your understanding of the central image.
• Discuss one or two poetic devices Poe uses for effect.”

These questions do focus on the craft of the poem, but they do not support students’ understanding of key ideas and specific details within the poem.

The Grade 7 materials partially meet the expectations of indicator 2c. Text-dependent questions and tasks are sometimes sequenced for students to analyze the integration of knowledge and ideas in single texts and across multiple texts. While questions and tasks are text dependent, they do not consistently support students’ analysis of knowledge and ideas. By the end of the year, students have practice eliciting evidence from texts.

Students read to analyze a variety of texts and work with questions and tasks to understand the forms through which ideas are conveyed, such as poetry, essay, novel, and film. Through close reading and analyzing elements skilled writers use to develop text, students learn to write real and imagined narratives while they learn about the topics and themes. Students analyze components, organizational structures, and language. The materials do not consistently support students’ building knowledge of the content provided by the texts, however. Rich texts are used as a vehicle to learn the component parts of texts, but students are not guided to engage in deeper critical thinking about the texts themselves.

The program does have students work across text sets and pairs of texts (such as the paired poems noted in indicator 2b) but also has activities across genre and form. One example that illustrates how this is presented to students is in Unit 3, when students work with clips from the film Invictus, excerpts from the film's source material, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin, the poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley, a biography of Nelson Mandela from an online source, and Mandela's autobiography.

Questions in this section are text dependent, but do not extend students’ knowledge beyond the assignment at hand. For example: Discussion questions such as, "Based on your knowledge of Nelson Mandela’s personal history, why might this poem have been important to him? What connections can you make between his life and the ideas in the poem?" require students to marshall evidence from the texts they've been reading and synthesize their evidence, but are not followed by more questions or tasks around the content and meaning of the reading itself.

The instructional materials for Grade 7 partially meet the expectations of indicator 2d. Instructional materials support students' ability to complete culminating tasks in which they demonstrate their integrated skills (e.g., combination of reading, writing, speaking, and listening). The culminating tasks are of value to the student, emphasizing completion and synthesis of more than one standard learned and practiced, over the course of the lesson, unit, and year. However, the culminating tasks do not necessarily promote the building of students’ knowledge of the theme/topic, instead focusing solely on the skills themselves.

Culminating tasks are multifaceted from a skills standpoint and require students to demonstrate mastery of several different standards at grade level. Earlier questions and tasks give the teacher usable information about student readiness for whether they will be able to successfully complete culminating tasks and provide multiple opportunities for formative assessments. Support for success is provided by Online close reading and Writer's Workshops, clear expectations for success in each Embedded Assessment, and clearly defined expectations for the grade in the form of grade level CCSS- ELA standards being provided in the Student Edition.

Following are some examples of how the program provides integrated, culminating tasks that allow students to practice integrated skills:

One of the Culminating Activities for Unit 1 is a personal narrative. The is preceded by activities that focus on making careful observation of textual details, reading widely from fiction and non fiction, drafting reflective writing, analyzing poems, and analyzing author's use of diction. Through analysis of novel excerpts and autobiography, students learn that successful narratives include a description of the incident, explanation of resolution, and use of language for effect. After analyzing effective narratives, students create their own.

For Unit 2, one Culminating Activity is an expository essay and participation in a collaborative discussion. Prior to this, students study advertising techniques, analyze print (and non-print) advertisements, and engage in collaborative discussion. This Unit supports students' growing research skills, and they select a research question and gather information from a variety of sources, evaluating for credibility and accuracy using prompts and tools to support their efforts. To process and share this information, students participate in collaborative discussions. Students synthesize their research and draw conclusions in the expository essay.

A Culminating Activity for Unit 3 is to write a Literary Analysis Essay. Students conduct a novel study and participate in Literature Circles and Socratic Seminars focused on the elements of their selected novel. To support comprehension, students use double entry journals, in which they track evidence that will be used later in their essays. Close reading strategies help students make meaning from the text and identify relevant textual evidence to develop literary analysis paragraphs. Students work in small groups to practice generating ideas and supporting their analyses with evidence from the text. Tasks support students' moving from group writing to independent practice as they complete their comparative literary analysis.

Another Culminating Activity in Unit 3 has students create a multimedia biographical presentation. Students examine how biographical and historical facts are presented in media, integrating information from film, biography, and autobiography to develop deeper understanding of the topic and content while studying the different ways the forms convey information. Students are asked to consider the impact of visual media, and value of evaluating sources and work collaboratively and present ideas with multiple opportunities to refine presentation skills. They select texts, visuals, music, and quotes to use in a for their biography, working collaboratively to analyze information, infer meaning, as they craft the whole multimedia presentation.

A Culminating Activity in Unit 4 guides students to create and present a monologue. Students have read, listened to, and analyzed poetry along the course of the other units, and are presented with more works in this unit. Students compare and contrast writers' use of language and evaluate writing styles. Students identify monologues' structures, analyzing the connection between content, audience, and purpose. They draft and present their own monologues, with guidance and support on speaking skills.

The instructional materials for Grade 7 partially meet the expectations of indicator 2e. Although there is a list at beginning of each unit with academic and literary terms that are tied to instruction of the unit, there is little support to transfer knowledge beyond each individual unit, and the words that are of focus are not consistently used to build knowledge for further application.

Student instructions for academic vocabulary repeat across all units. Students are given the same instructions under the heading "Developing Vocabulary" in each unit: "Look again at the Contents page and use a QHT strategy to analyze and evaluate your knowledge of the Academic Vocabulary and Literary Terms for the unit." In the middle of each unit, students are asked to reevaluate initial understanding. For example, in Activity 4.9 students are given the following instructions: "Use the QHT strategy to re-sort the vocabulary you have studied in the first part of this unit. Compare this sort with your original sort. How has your understanding changed? Select a word from the chart and write a concise statement about your learning. How has your understanding of this word changed over the course of this unit?" Students are also asked to keep a Readers/Writers notebook over the course of the year where they are to note vocabulary words that are unfamiliar to them.

Materials provide minimal teacher guidance outlining a cohesive year long vocabulary development component. Students are given a list of academic and literary terms at beginning of each unit, but these words do not consistently appear across multiple units. Students engage with vocabulary instruction in context of reading and writing, but the demands of each unit are different. Although vocabulary instruction is embedded, there is little attention given to struggling student's needs outside of differentiated instruction tips for ELL students and minimal support for advanced learners. Vocabulary is repeated in contexts but not always across multiple texts.