Additional insights from the site visit were provided as separate reports shortly after the visit, included in Appendices 7-9.
Program Reception and Recommendations for Improvement Far and away, the district’s educators were overwhelmingly positive in their views of Scholastic and RISE/Up; one of the educators in the comparison group expressed interest in using the program with her students. They appreciated the “grab and go” sense of RISE, that the materials were ready to be used in the classroom as soon as the box was open. Some commonly repeated positives focused on the high quality of RISE materials, which included the books, passages, and text-based questions; the completeness of the program; and the high-interest component of the subjects included in the readings. These positive qualities helped facilitate the implementation by making it easy to use and engaging students. Having used the system for several months, educators and administrators had specifc feedback that would better serve them in using RISE as their reading intervention curriculum. These suggestions largely fell into three categories: educator support, physical materials, and program content. Regarding support educators seek from RISE, one noted that she would like to see more instructional examples with exemplar answers for teachers, eliminating some of the guesswork of identifying optimal answers. One administrator noted how much she and her staf enjoyed the full-day training provided by RISE/Up but also stated a desire for an internalization day in which teachers could strategize and collaborate within and across grade levels to enact interventions. Additionally, as teachers work to comply with changing district and state requirements, those educators who were expected to scan in and display all of their reading materials, including passages used during interventions. The time taken to do this scanning hindered teachers from using that same time to plan for student lessons. Making classroom libraries available to parents, administrators, and districts was a staggering undertaking that online materials could support or solve. While this may vary widely among school districts, making note of expectations about the availability of classroom materials outside of school is a potential source of educator support. Educators would also like to see a deeper assessment piece to accompany RISE. In completing the educator logs, the repetition of skills became apparent. However, teachers noted that, without an assessment aligned to these interventions, tracking growth within the specifc frame of skills taught in RISE could be a difcult task. The creation and management of paper-based materials hindered the implementation. If the RISE team is considering providing running records to accompany given texts, online and print-ready options are sought-after additions.
LXD Research -RISE and RISE UP Winter 2022-Spring 2023 Report
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