Standards-based Learning Committees

7/3/2018

We’ve been making TeacherEase more collaborative in standards-based learning (SBL) environments.  Most SBL implementations start with teams of educators working together to build guaranteed and viable curriculum.  This usually includes learning targets, rubrics, assessments, and aligned instructional content. Once completed, districts roll out SBL practices at scale for teachers to use in the classroom.  

Today most districts build content in Google Docs/Drive.  While Google is nice for individual documents, it’s lack of structure often creates problems for SBL implementations.  There’s no SBL workflow to help new educators understand the process. It often devolves into teachers working in their own little spaces, not aware of their colleagues contributions.  

We think purpose-built SBL software can better address the problem.  TeacherEase understands SBL, and has a database dedicated to storing and managing your curriculum.  As you walk through our software, you’re build all the necessary content to support SBL.

Here’s a quick tour...  First educators are collected into committees.  An example would be the “Upper Elementary Math” committee. Courses are attached to the committee, and members build the SBL curriculum for those courses.  For our Math committee, there would probably be Courses for “3-Math,” “4-Math,” and “5-Math.”

Committee members can make contributions to build learning targets, rubrics, assessments, etc.  This allows the group to push content development forward.

To keep teams organized, members have a view of the latest contributions.  It’s easy to find and review recent work done by the committee. The system remembers which changes are new for you, and highlights contributions you haven’t seen.  In this way it’s easy to keep track of progress.

Each member can review changes made by colleagues.  They can read and understand their contributions. They’re able to make further revisions and push the document forward.  In a future version, we’ll add comments where they can have professional discussions about content.

Each document has a version history.  So it’s easy to dive down at a granular level and see how a document has developed.

With TeacherEase, you have software to help committees work together and build the content necessary for SBL to be successful.  Feel free to give it a try.