Clunky, anti-diverse, and deceptive
Community Review for StudySync
My Take
I am going to emphasize things teachers were promised in the sales pitch that do not exist.
1) Audio support for texts. This is haphazard and unpredictable. A core text in a unit will have no audio support but optional, independent reads will.
2) Diverse voices and opinions. In the entire 12th grade core curriculum, students are never, not once, asked to conduct a close reading of a text by an African-American or Latino author. All close readings are centered on texts written more than 20 years ago and predominantly by white authors. StudySync tries to look like a modern and diverse text set by providing lots of extra texts in the library and in optional reads, but the actual core curriculum that students read repeatedly and write in detail about contains very little not written by a white man prior to the 21st century.
3) On- and off-line flexibility. In a poor district with frequent laptop and connectivity issues, this was key for me. StudySync reps reiterated that everything available online was also supported in the workbooks and that it was easy for teachers to print off materials from the site. This is simply and entirely a lie. Most of my colleagues and I are spending hours every day screenshotting or otherwise manipulating materials to try and render them printable for students whose IEPs require physical texts. Rubrics especially are impossible to print. And speaking of diverse learners...
4) StudySync trumpets its "scaffolds" and supports. These "scaffolds" consist of absolutely nothing for ELL students except a picture glossary of key language, a summary of texts and repetitive, meaningless "discussion stems." Scaffolds for students with IEPs or otherwise below grade level are even rarer and more surface-level. Supposed extensions for students above grade level are slightly better.
5) Interesting and engaging material and activities. Students do the exact same thing with every single text, from sixth to twelfth grade, with the exact same language and repeated videos across grade levels. It is abundantly clear that a large part of "writing" this curriculum was copying-and-pasting.
This is a disaster of a curriculum, deceptively sold to districts desperate for a resource for new or overworked teachers, that seems deliberately designed to drain any interest in literature from all students but especially students of color or those reading below grade level.
How I Use It
I am mandated to use this daily in my inclusion 12th grade English and honors English 3. The online annotation is the only remotely useful aspect of the curriculum. The "lesson" videos are repetitive, inaccurate and dull. The skills lessons are haphazard and the key, necessary content often hidden while obscure vocabulary words are emphasized.
For example, a skill lesson for a 12th grade text is "nonfiction text structures." Common text structures are mentioned, but not explicitly taught, in either the video played for students or the "lesson plan" provided to teachers. The supposed skill being taught is not assessed in any way, with students instead being asked to define "pertinent evidence" via a click-and-drag chart. It should be clear that the ability to drag "pertinent evidence" into the right box hardly shows mastery of recognizing and analyzing text structures such as cause-and-effect or problem-and-solution.
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Studysync is one of the worst, most flawed english curriculums currently in use
Not for use with special education students!
