My presentation will focus on strategies we can use as high school teachers to provide students space to both delve deeply into their reading and to develop their authentic academic voices. Specifically, I will outline how to compile and implement a few different thinking and discussion protocols — “Thoughts, Questions, and Connections and Epiphanies” (adapted from Marisa Thompson), “Musical Chairs” Literary Analysis (adapted from Susan Barber), and “Hexagonal Thinking” (adapted from Betsy Potash) — to strategically scaffold for authentic high-level whole-class discussions and analytical writing about complex literary texts. While my presentation is based in a High School English Language Arts context, these strategies would work for any class for which students read complex texts and then analyze meanings.