8 Engaging and Easy Reading Diagnostics of High School ELA

Reading Instruction

Reading diagnostics are a necessary but not glamorous part of back-to-school season. At the beginning of the school year, it’s more fun to focus on building classroom community, making positive contact with families, and establishing routines and procedures.

No one ever started teaching because they love reading diagnostics.

Nevertheless, reading diagnostics are important because they provide teachers with an updated snapshot of who students are as readers. Teaching is an art and a science, and the data collected from reading diagnostics informs our practice.

Well-developed reading diagnostics provide information about student skills in a variety of areas, touching on many standards. However, finding or designing well-developed reading diagnostics that you trust can be tricky. Sure, there are plenty of mega corporations touting their tools, but those cost serious money and, in my experience, are more flash than substance.

For that reason, I wanted to share 8 resources that can easily act as reading diagnostics.

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My Favorite Reading Diagnostic

When I set out to design and choose reading diagnostics, I want to capture as much information as possible while keeping students engaged. That’s why I started using “Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you’ve never noticed.” This is a TED-Talk from Roman Mars, the host of the podcast 99% Invisible.

Here’s how I use this resource:

Students complete the Before Reading question and think-write-pair-share their answers. Students preview the questions, so they know what to listen for.
As a class, we watch the TED-Talk. You can watch it right here. That takes about 20 minutes. Students can answer questions while watching.
Then, students finish answering the questions. The questions focus on reading and listening comprehension, making inferences, and context clues. You may be wondering why I use an audio-visual task to assess reading: first, it’s engaging; second, listening comprehension is such an important part of classroom instruction that it’s important to capture that skill, too.
Depending on how much time we have left, students may have a chance to check their answers with a neighbor, but then they turn in their work. There are 15-20 questions.
Before our next class period, I grade the multiple-choice questions and look for trends in the data. I’ve created a Google Form to use with this, but I usually give it on paper because not all of my students have their devices during the first week of school.
The next day, I give students back their work, and we discuss the most commonly-missed questions. It’s valuable to hear students share their thinking. I want to understand their thought processes so I can identify common misconceptions and thought habits.

One of the benefits of this resource is that it also comes with a writing diagnostic. Students have the chance to create their own flag to represent themselves, their school, or their city. This creative endeavour taps into another part of student thinking and is a good way to build classroom community. Once students have designed their own flag, they write a paragraph explaining their choices.

Anytime you’re reading student writing, you have a chance to get to know them. In this situation, students can share a little bit about themselves in a low-stress way. When I read through these paragraphs, I’m looking to see how well students can structure their writing, whether or not they can use evidence, and how clearly they communicate. Since this is not a writing where students do research or produce in-text citations, they pull all the “evidence” from their flag, which gives me a clear picture of whether or not they can support their claims.

Bonus: If students enjoy the TED-Talk, Roman Mars also has a book called The 99% Invisible City, which can make a great addition to your classroom library. In short bits, Mars presents information about all the little weird details of city planning, and that may sound dry, but it’s fascinating.

5 Poems to Use as Reading Diagnostics

In addition to the TED-Talk above, I often want to gauge students’ skills with poetry. When this is the case, I look for poems that don’t pull punches and that have clear main ideas. These are poems that fit the bill and can be used as reading diagnostics:

“Blueprints?” by Sara Holbrook is short, sweet, and relatable for students. It’s ideal for evaluating students’ abilities with character analysis, text structure, main idea, inference, and syntax. Read it here.
“When I Was One-and-Twenty” by A.E. Housman is an ideal diagnostic for seniors. Even while gathering data about context clues, tone, syntax, and characterization, teachers can help students “frame” their final year in high school. Read it here.
“Names” by Teresa Mei Chuc is the longest poem on this list, but it might also be my favorite. This poem touches on identity formation, something close to the heart of nearly all high school students. This resource touches on inference, characterization, syntax, and figurative language and acts as a jumping-off point for important back-to-school conversations. Read it here.
“A Poison Tree” by William Blake is a poem that fits so many places in a literature classroom. It’s short enough to be used for a reading diagnostic, but it can also used to teach allusion, introduce literary criticism, or practice synthesizing across media. Read it here.
Finally, “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver is maybe my favorite poem on this list. Like “When I Was One-and-Twenty,” this is an ideal poem for framing senior English. As a reading diagnostic, this poem works well to assess point of view, main idea, and text structure. Read it here.

Creative Reading Diagnostics

Sometimes teachers need more flexible reading diagnostics. These two resources provide a little more wiggle room when it comes to gauging student skills and understanding.

First, if you need something short and sweet, the TED-ed video “The pleasure of poetic pattern” is a winner. This short video walks students through one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and quickly runs down figurative language. In terms of reviewing figurative language, I don’t think you can do better. Watch it here.
For something longer, teachers can pair any poem or short story with these Literary Analysis Stations, which cover main idea, summary, plot, character, theme, and more. Choose what text(s) you want students to analyze. Then, identify what skills you want to evaluate, and set up only the stations you need. As a reading diagnostic, this provides high levels of engagement and also allows students to practice key classroom procedures and to build classroom community. Read more about how I use literary analysis stations.