Representatives from i-Ready are meeting with Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools teachers to share ideas for incentivizing learning in a series of collaborative professional development sessions.
i-Ready is an online assessment tool that WS/FCS relies on to help students get ready for their end-of-year exams. Students complete a variety of modules that gauge their performance in subjects like math and reading, and the program produces specific feedback that teachers can incorporate into lessons. The result is a more individualized and efficient test preparation process that ensures students get help where they need it the most.
However, i-Ready isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, and every school has different ways of deploying it. The collaborative sessions, which are being held at various schools throughout the year, are opportunities to share ideas and feedback to make the program more effective for everyone.
“It was really just a way for us to meet on a regular cadence with the leaders and teachers at middle schools in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools and really try to figure out what are the pain points,” said Jake Jung of Curriculum Associates, the company behind i-Ready.
One top priority across schools is incentivizing students to keep up with their i-Ready modules. Several teachers used the collaborative as a chance to bring up that their middle schoolers found the content too childish, so the software was adapted to offer middle school students a more serious and straightforward version.
Conversations at the collaborative sessions have also highlighted competition between classes as a strong motivator. Offering rewards like food and theme days to classes with high participation rates has driven up engagement, especially when there are games involved.
“Sportsarama went great last year. They loved it and they’re asking for it again,” said MTSS Interventionist Katie Lilly from Walkertown Middle School. “We’ve had buy-in.”
Both educators and the i-Ready team feel that the collaborative has made a positive impact on i-Ready implementation. It used to be much more difficult to communicate concerns and suggestions about how to make sure students were getting the most out of the program. With a dedicated time and place to have those discussions, they’re feeling more optimistic about student preparedness in the second half of the school year.
“It’s really in the title, it’s about collaboration and the sharing of ideas,” said Walkertown Middle Principal Monica Bruce. “We’ve never had a shared space to be able to do that, and that’s when we come together."