SCHOLASTIC LITERACY
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A commonly expressed sentiment was that the graphic organizers were useful for organizing ideas, but “there is a step missing … putting it all together.” In other words, students lacked the ability to make the leap from using the graphic organizer to crafting a piece of writing. There needs to be explicit instruction on how graphic organizers should inform writing practice. One teacher found the graphic organizer to be a valuable tool for one-on-one conferencing: “Once I started conferencing with the organizer they did, that helped.” The fact that students do not have access to the texts at all times was a frequent area of concern for many teachers. During the Read-Alouds, students do not have the text in-hand. This is problematic for many teachers, who commented: Love for them to be able to revisit the text in their hands, but its only projectable. To have a book in their hands would be so nice. They read so much on the screens. It’s hard to analyze a text unless you can re-read it. They’ve only listened to it. They can’t go back and re-read. KIDS NEED A COPY OF ALL TEXTS. I cannot say this enough. They need it for attention purposes. Even if this is provided digitally. Another area of weakness, as identified in survey and focus group responses, was with the Scholastic Literacy writing assessments. Multiple different issues emerged with writing, though some themes centered on the lack of formative writing assessments throughout the unit, a “lack of scaffolded support,” and misalignment between the reading and writing assignments. Some teachers expressed that they had to improvise in some areas—for example, using the “Think Mores” as formative assessments and modifying the standard writing rubrics that were provided by Scholastic. Recommendations Teacher respondents gave their personal recommendations for how to improve Scholastic Literacy. Some of the open-ended responses were extremely granular and specific only to one teacher’s experiences with the program. Therefore, the recommendations included in this section reflect themes that emerged from multiple teachers’ perspectives.
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