Rigorous ELA.
Sustainable Teaching.
For Honors, Pre-AP & AP English
Thoughtful systems and classroom-ready resources for secondary English teachers who want students thinking deeply—without building every lesson from scratch.
Rigorous ELA shouldn’t require rebuilding everything from scratch.
Stein by Design creates thoughtful instructional systems and classroom-ready resources for advanced secondary ELA teachers who want students thinking deeply, discussing meaningfully, and writing with purpose—without spending every evening building it all from the ground up.
Think Deeply
Literary analysis, close reading, and conceptual frameworks that help students move beyond identification into interpretation.
Discuss Meaningfully
Structured discussion systems that help students use evidence, ask better questions, and build ideas together.
Write With Purpose
Scaffolds and systems for stronger commentary, analytical writing, complexity, and sophistication.
Start Here
Choose the classroom problem you want to solve first.
Literary Analysis
Help students move from identifying evidence to explaining meaning, significance, and complexity.
Classroom Discussion
Build stronger Socratic seminars and academic discussions with clear structures, preparation, and accountability.
AP Writing
Support stronger commentary, complexity, and sophistication with tools designed for advanced writers.
Students can find evidence. Help them learn what to do with it.
Get the free Reasoning Ladder reference guide and give students a repeatable framework for moving from evidence to meaningful literary analysis.
About Stein by Design
I’m a secondary English teacher who loves the moment when students stop looking for the “right answer” and start making arguments of their own.
I also know how much work it takes to build the scaffolds, questions, writing support, and assessments that get them there.
Stein by Design grew out of that tension: I wanted rigorous materials I could actually use in a real classroom—thoughtful enough for advanced learners, structured enough to support students who aren’t there yet, and complete enough that the teacher doesn’t have to spend Sunday rebuilding the lesson.
Latest from the Blog
Practical ideas for teaching rigorous secondary ELA without reinventing every lesson, discussion, and writing task from scratch.