District Rollout Tips

We wrote this article to help you think through how you'd like to rollout structal to your teachers. As you've probably heard our founder Mike say, we want structal to feel as low lift as possible for you. The last thing you need is another initiative!

First, we'll go over some options of how to do the rollout. After that we'll give you some best practices based on what we've seen really resonate with teachers so that you can customize your message.

Rollout options

1. School/district wide presentations - You can give a presentation of structal during a school or district wide PD or staff meeting. This allows you to present to the most teachers in the least amount of time. The downside is that it allows for less customization of the message for teachers.
2. Department presentations - This method gives a good mix of reaching a lot of teachers quickly, while also allowing for some customization of the message. We've seen that because each academic department thinks about literacy and the role literacy plays in their class differently, this allows you as the administrator/coach to customize the message which will help teachers see the relevance of structal for their classroom. You can look at the articles here to see what has resonated with different departments in our experience.
3. Email rollout - This method can work if your school/district has success with teachers consistently opening their email. This allows you to reach your teachers very quickly, and if you have department email lists, allows you to customize the message (see here for what as resonated). If you follow this method, you'll need to follow up with your teachers multiple times (3-4 usually) to make sure they received the message and remember to get started.

Also, please know that we are tirelessly working to help you with this process by helping get the message out about structal and building the best support resources in edtech. This will increase teacher awareness of our tool and really help them to understand the relevance for their class.

Helping teachers see the value in structal

Ultimately, you know your teachers best and should connect the goals that your district/school has with providing your students with better reading support through structal.

Teachers also tend to appreciate an explanation why their students need additional reading support, especially if teaching reading is not their main subject. Nationally, 2/3 of students are not reading a grade level. This means that if you have an average classroom, 2/3 of your students are going to need some level of support to read your materials. Sharing this statistic tends to help people to understand the magnitude of the challenge we're working with!

Along these lines, customizing the message by subject to help teachers see why they need structal has been shown to greatly increase usage. While we know this can take a little more work, we hope these articles that talk about structal for each subject help to make that much easier.

Your tech integration specialists are also treasure troves of how to help teachers see the value in using tech tools. Since they have lots of experience with your specific teachers and technology, they are also a valuable asset for making sure your rollout resonates with teachers.