| State: Texas | Number of Students: 10,967 |
| School Type: Public School District | Free and Reduced Lunch: 44.1% |
| Grade Level: PK-12 | English Language Learners: 13.5% |
School Context
This small-medium school district in Texas serves 11,000 students. They are launching a blended learning pilot in one of their middle schools, hoping to incrementally bring on more schools if they see success. This campus pilot serves a student population that is 70% free and reduced lunch and boasts a very strong faculty, especially in their leadership.
State of Technology
In the last few years, the school administration has seen a decreasing number of students succeeding in Algebra and they have also seen an overall decrease in test scores. They think this is so for two major reasons: it is difficult for teachers in traditional models to meet all students' needs; and the recent math rewriting of TEKS have created gaps from one year to the next and so teachers have had trouble adjusting to the missing knowledge for this transitional group of students.
Currently, their current approach is very traditional, where teachers spend most of their time teaching to the middle level of students. Then teachers spend extra time doing interventions, but they cannot take that to scale. When it comes closer to test time, they are able to only focus on the bubble kids highest and lowest students are getting lost. They use Think Through Math for intervention support. Lastly, they worry that math has become a way for students to disengage with their learning and they hope to find a solution to re engage students to enjoy learning math.
Tech Needs & Requirements
They are looking for math software that can act as the primary technology used in their station rotation model. They will still use the McGraw Hill textbook. They would like to use this tool as the primary instructional delivery system. Students should be able to use this tool as the primary instruction for a concept and teachers can use to the tool to facilitate small group and individual interventions. For their ideal solution, the district is looking for a tool that satisfies most of the following features. They are looking for a tool that has a robust library of concepts and content something more than a practice tool. They prefer for the tool to have adaptive functionality in order for the students to be met where they are and help fill gaps when necessary. All content must be TEKS aligned. If the tool has a diagnostic that is a nice to have. The tool should provide regular checks to see if student is on pace. Students will be in a station rotation model. They would like for the tool to give the primary instructional delivery where students acquire the math concepts for the first time using the program and the teacher provides the intervention they would like the students to stay motivated to persist in their learning, so when a student might get an answer wrong, the tool offers them a variety of scaffolding, feedback and support to help the student get to the next level or concept.
Students should be able to see where they are and where they need to go to stay motivated to keep progressing. However, they do not need to control their own path.
Teachers should have access to a slick dashboard to see how each student is doing, his or her struggles and gains with topics and concepts. They would like to be able to see the data for students within the dashboard in order to pull face to face to lessons when necessary. This district does not want teachers to have to pull data. They want easy reports by topic, by standards and by students.
The tool must: be TEKS aligned; provide easy to read data for teachers to do realtime intervention; no manual import of student rosters; have robust feedback for student users so they avoid simply clicking through the tool; and provide ample resources for students to learn concepts. The district provides Chromebooks, but are not opposed to switching. They have about 30% of class on the stations with a 1:3 ratio. The tool should provide easy reporting and show student progress by standard and topic, class progress by standard and topic and progress by teacher. The district prefers Clever single sign on.