5 Questions to Ask When Choosing an ELA Program for Your School

In the ELA review sessions that I had the opportunity to participate in with Academic Heads and subject teachers, the initial demo was often quite easy to create sympathy. There are reading passages, videos, vocabulary activities, quizzes, writing prompts, dashboards, and sometimes a resource library large enough to make the viewer feel like they just opened a cabinet with many drawers.

The harder stuff starts after that.

An ELA program will stay with students through their school years. What you choose today will influence how you read a text, find evidence, build an argument, write a long essay, listen to other points of view, and express your thoughts in class. So when reviewing ELA, I often spend less time on the number of features and more time on how the curriculum is building those competencies.

There are five questions that I find particularly helpful as Academic Head begins to dive into a program.

1. After each school year, what are students really expected to do?

A curriculum map can contain many standards and objectives, but what Academic Head needs to see more clearly is student progression. If we open Grade 6, Grade 7, then Grade 8 side by side, will differences appear in the complexity of the text, quality of reasoning, writing requirements, and how students use evidence?

When reviewing student outcomes, I often look at a few fairly basic questions:

·Can students read increasingly complex texts?

·Do you know how to choose appropriate evidence to support an argument?

·Is writing evolving from the sentence and paragraph level to articles with clearer structure and reasoning?

·Are speaking & listening built throughout the curriculum or just appear as an extra activity? 

·Is vocabulary learned in the context of reading and writing or does it mainly exist as word lists?

A good ELA program needs to show Academic Head that development path over time. I have encountered curriculums that have a lot of content in each grade, but when you put the grades side by side it is quite difficult to answer in what way students are becoming better readers and writers.

That's my reasonusuallyopenscope & sequencebefore going too deeply into each lesson. A nice sample lesson tells a lot about a school day; The new progression shows what the curriculum is planning to do in three or four years.

2. Do Reading and Writing really go together?

One of my favorite parts to see in an ELA demo is what happens after students finish reading a text.

If the lesson ends with a few comprehension sentences and a quiz, the team has seen a fairly small portion of ELA. In the classroom, reading can open up more than that: students analyze how the author builds an idea, go back to the text to find evidence, compare two sources, discuss with friends and then use what they just read to write.

A natural learning sequence can often be viewed as:

Read➜Think➜Discuss➜Write

When opening any unit, Academic Head can see how far apart the reading task and writing task are in terms of instructional logic. Do writing prompts really need students to return to the text? Can the evidence you just read be used in discussion or argument? Do the writing skills from the previous unit continue to be used in the next unit or does each lesson start almost from the beginning?

This is also where the quality of the text becomes important. If the curriculum wants students to have a good discussion or write an in-depth argument, they need to have something worth thinking about and debating about. Text selection, literary quality, informational content, cultural range and complexity should therefore not be reviewed separately from writing.

With theseschool is watching ELA Core Curriculum, I usuallyI recommend opening a whole unit instead of just looking at some of the best screenshots in the demo. Going from the first text to the final writing task will tell more about how the program actually works.

3. Is Curriculum good for students but too heavy for teachers?

Teacher side is often where a demo starts to get more real.

The student interface can be very attractive, but by the time the teacher opens the lesson plan, rubric, differentiated resources and reporting, the school team can clearly visualize how much work will have to be done each week to make the curriculum actually work.

I often check with the Academic Head and teachers: 

·Is the teacher edition clear enough to understand lesson intent and instructional sequence?

·Is the lesson structure consistent so teachers don't have to "relearn the platform" every time they open a new unit?

·Are there appropriate suggested questions or discussion guidance?

·Is writing support enough from planning, drafting to revision and assessment?

·Are there differentiated resources for different student groups?

·Are rubrics and examples available for important tasks?

·Can the teacher see student progress quickly enough to use in planning?

A content-rich curriculum can become very labor-intensive if teachers have to create additional worksheets, slides, rubrics, and differentiated materials for most of the lessons. The cost at that time was not just in the license. It lies in the evenings where the teacher has to prepare additional materials, in the time the Academic Head has to standardize lessons between classes, and in the level of the program's dependence on a few very good teachers.

There is a question I found quite useful: Can a teacher new to the school use this curriculum after a reasonable amount of training?

If the implementation only works well when there are a few teachers who understand the program very deeply and build in the missing parts themselves, the school team will have to consider that risk right from the review stage. Teacher resources and implementation support Therefore, it should be viewed with student content, not until after the curriculum has been purchased.

4. Does assessment help teachers teach better?

Dashboards in today's digital programs are often very beautiful. There are colors, charts, percentages, standards, and sometimes all sorts of filters to make the viewer spend a few minutes just trying to see what each button does.

What I'm more concerned about is after the teacher finishes looking at the data, is the next step clear or not?

A useful assessment system should help the school team answer quite mundane questions:

·Where are students relative to learning expectations?

·Which reading or writing skill is weak?

·Which groups need reteaching or additional practice?

·Which group is ready to move on to a more difficult task?

·Can the teacher find resources suitable for the gap just discovered?

The Academic Head should also distinguish between what assessment is used for measure with assessment used to instruction support.These two purposes are related, but the classroom needs both. A benchmark can give the school team a broader picture of progress, while small formative checks in the lesson help the teacher decide what should happen the next day.

In the way BooksVN looks at a curriculum package, Assessment often acts as a connection between Core Curriculum and subsequent support parts. Student data can show how the curriculum is running and which student groups may need personalized learning or intervention.

If the data stops at a number on the dashboard, its instructional value is still quite limited.

5. Print, Digital or a combination of both?

This is a question I hear quite often when schools review ELA, and the answer often depends heavily on how the classroom is running.

Digital has clear advantages. Multimedia can help expand the context of a text. Interactive activities are convenient for practice and feedback. Teachers can assign assignments, manage submissions, view assessment data and access resources in one place. With accessibility or updating materials, digital also has advantages that print is difficult to completely replace.

ELA has a unique characteristic: students spend a lot of time working directly with text.

In a close-reading lesson, I still see the value of students holding a printed text, underlining a phrase, circling a piece of evidence, writing a few slightly scribbled words in the margin and then turning back to the previous page to check if they remembered correctly or not. These very small acts are a natural part of the reading experience in many classrooms.

Therefore, when reviewing Print + Digital Learning,I often work with the school team to see where each format is adding value.

·Is Print more useful for long-form reading, annotation and close reading?

·Is digital better suited for multimedia, assignments, assessment and reporting?

·What level of digital does the school's student age and device access allow?

·What workflow does the teacher want to manage reading, writing and feedback?

In the packages BooksVN is building for Middle School 6–8andHigh School 9–12, hereis also the reason StudySync can be viewed in both Digital and Print + Digital models. Meanwhile, some STEM programs may be more convenient when deployed digital-first.

Each subject has a different learning experience, so the format should also be chosen based on how the subject takes place in the classroom.

And then there usually comes a sixth question

The five questions above help Academic Head review the curriculum. But near the end of a discussion session, I often see the School Leader or Director return to a very practical issue: after the contract is signed, who will work with the school to do the rest?

Curriculum adoption is when a decision is made. New implementation is when teachers and students start living that decision every day.

Before finalizing the program, I would like the school team to know quite clearly:

·Who supports account setup and technical onboarding?

·How is teacher training organized?

·If the school needs to replenish licenses mid-year, what is the process?

·Is it possible to pilot a grade or a subject first?

·After the first weeks of implementation, has anyone reviewed feedback and emerging issues with Academic Head?

·When teachers have difficulty with or platform, is the support path curriculum clear?

An implementation is rarely complete by the time the username and password are sent to the school team. In the weeks that followed, questions began to appear that the previous product demonstration could not have predicted.

With BooksVN, I often look at the process in a relatively simple flow:

Review needs➜Review curriculum➜Make an implementation plan➜Teacher training➜According to dohi➜ Dadjust

This flow also explains why BooksVN builds content and solution groups according to the curriculum decision journey, instead of letting the school team have to start from a long catalog and then find ways to match products to their needs.

A short checklist before Academic Head goes into price and package

After an ELA review session, I often try to return to the six questions below. They do not replace a full curriculum evaluation, but if one of the six questions is still unclear then perhaps the team has a bit of homework left before moving on to commercial discussion.

·Student outcomes Is it clear enough for each grade?

·Reading and Writing Is there really a connection in the instructional sequence?

·Teacher resources Is it enough for the curriculum to be used daily without creating too much additional workload?

·Assessment Does it generate data that teachers and Academic Heads can act on?

·Print/Digital selected according to learning purpose and classroom reality?

·Implementation support Is it clear enough from onboarding to follow-up?

When these six parts are relatively clear, discussions about pricing and packages also become easier. School teams know what they are paying for, which components they really need, and which components can be left for a later stage.

With ELA, this is especially important because the curriculum will follow students through many reading, writing and discussion experiences. A good decision often comes from looking deeply enough into those experiences before looking at the number of features on the brochure.

Comparing ELA programs for one or more grades?

BooksVN can review the curriculum with the School Leader, Academic Head and subject team, and directly open teacher/student resources StudySync,See the assessment and build a Digital or Print + Digital configuration that matches the school's timetable, teacher readiness and current implementation.

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