ELA

This article will help you to understand how structal can fit into your ELA classroom.

If you have a national average classroom, 2 out of 3 of your students can't read grade level texts. This means that when they read the novels, articles, and short stories you assign, 2 out of 3 of your students will greatly struggle to understand what they just read. This can mean that you spend the entire lesson helping them to just literally understand what they read instead of discussing the bigger themes and building the critical thinking skills and love of literature that you got into ELA to teach!

ELA teachers have told us structal helps them in the following ways:

Help students to understand your texts

Our founder, Mike, was an ELA teacher. Many of the texts we teach in ELA are prized for their rich language and vivid writing style. But these things can also make the texts difficult for students to understand. structal's vocabulary and reading comprehension supports help students learn to break down texts to build their understanding.

Address fundamental skills gaps

As discussion of student reading skill gaps have gained more prominence, we've heard from a lot of ELA teachers that they're being asked to do more fundamental reading instruction. One problem – if you're like most ELA teachers, your teacher training program didn't have any instruction on teaching reading fundamentals. By automatically adding a layer of reading support to anything your students read, allowing them to hear words read aloud and build up their vocabulary, you can address those skills gaps while still teaching the texts you love.

Help your colleagues

Similar to the above, as students' reading troubles have gained more attention, we've had many ELA teachers tell us their colleagues in other subjects ask them for help with getting their students to understand texts for their class. Since structal works on any digital text, structal is something you can suggest to your colleagues to give them the help their students need with reading comprehension.

Diagnosing student issues

We've all been there, you get to the end of a lesson and you wonder, "What happened?" structal's reports, like our word cloud, help you to see what specific vocabulary and concepts your students struggled with in what they read so you don't have to guess. This lets you easily and effectively address student misunderstandings so they don't compound.