Your students can spot a metaphor. They just can't do anything with it.
You already do this work every time you read. You register power, catch a contradiction, feel the pull of a symbol, all at once and most of it invisible, which is exactly what makes analysis so hard to teach. SPECTRUM takes the white light of reading and shows students the colors inside it, so the ways of thinking you do on instinct become eight moves they can see and try. The same eight travel across every text, which means you set this up once this summer and stop rebuilding analysis from scratch.
The SPECTRUM KitThey name the device, and then they stop.
Here is what I kept running into. I would ask students to analyze a passage. They would highlight something, call it a symbol or foreshadowing, and then they would stop. They had done the thing. They had named the device, and as far as they could tell, analysis was complete.
For a long time I read that as a skills gap. More modeling, more close reading, more sentence starters. Some of that helped. The deeper issue was that students had no way to decide what to look for. They walked into a text with no orientation and spotted whatever happened to jump out at them.
Summer is a good time to solve this once. The fix is not a single lesson you have to rebuild for every text. It is a way of looking that you set up before the first text of the year and then use all the way through.
What they needed was a lens.
One text. Eight directions you can choose to look from.
As experienced readers, we already know there is more than one way to approach a text. Literary criticism has spent more than a century mapping those approaches, from formalism to feminist theory to deconstruction, and each one is a different decision about what matters on the page. SPECTRUM gathers that expert work and distills it into eight moves a fifteen year old can actually use, so the rigor lives in the thinking and the labels get out of the way. Each lens is a direction a student picks before reading for evidence, the way a prism separates one beam of light into colors that were there the whole time.
Hover or tap a lens to see what it asks
Everything you need to run SPECTRUM, free.
What SPECTRUM is
Each lens is a way of looking, and the same text reveals something different through each one. Here is the thinking behind the eight, where the framework came from, and enough to decide this summer whether it fits how you already teach.
The analytical identity quiz
A personality-style quiz that shows students the analytical moves they already make, so they walk in seeing themselves as analysts. It maps the whole landscape for them, where they naturally fit and where they might stretch, which makes the lenses concrete by starting from what a student already does.
The eight BINGO boards
A board for each lens that gives students twenty-five specific places to look. The boards are text agnostic, so the same eight work on a short story in September and a novel in May. Students carry the tool across every text instead of learning a new one each unit.
A slideshow to introduce it
A ready-to-present slideshow that introduces SPECTRUM to students, the whole idea and the eight lenses, in language fifteen year olds actually hold onto. Day one of analysis is already built for you.
The lenses in action
A full intro activity where students practice the lenses on a Pixar short. They run real analysis on something they can watch in a few minutes, so the moves click before they ever open a written text.
English Classroom Architect
Walk into next year with this already built.
This is built for teachers who have taught analysis for a while and keep running into the same ceiling. You do not need to learn a new vocabulary or rebuild your units to use it. The lenses travel across any text you already teach, so you can set this up once this summer and have it ready before day one.
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