When I was a teacher, my weekends tended to have a similar cadence. Friday night was spent unwinding and trying to stay awake during family movie night. Saturday and part of Sunday were about spending time with my girls, running errands, going grocery shopping, and tackling a mound of laundry.
Early Sunday afternoon my attention would shift back to my class as I reviewed student work, thought about where I was in each subject, and examined how my lessons had gone last week and what I planned to teach next. If we were starting a new unit, I would try to determine what my students knew relative to the skills and concepts of the unit and which ones they might need to revisit. This was a labor-intensive process that involved classroom data and MAP® Growth™ class and student profile reports.
For math units, I would dig into curriculum guides and standards documents to unpack which precursor skills were the building blocks for the new content. I would think about the best way to reteach these skills to the students who needed it. Next came hours of organizing resources and figuring out how to implement them within my class time. Finally, I used my MAP Growth reports to create mixed-skill groups and determine which students would likely need extra support.
By pulling MAP Growth data directly into […] Reveal Math […], teachers can harness the power of MAP Growth data and leverage the coherence of the standards to easily provide targeted supplemental lessons.
All in all, it was no simple process. I can only imagine how COVID-19 interruptions have increased the challenges as many teachers find themselves with larger classes, due to teacher shortages, and an even wider variation in student knowledge, due to closures and access issues.
Understanding how time-consuming this process is led NWEA and McGraw Hill to partner on a MAP Growth and Reveal Math integration. By pulling MAP Growth data directly into the Reveal Math online platform, teachers can harness the power of MAP Growth data and leverage the coherence of the standards to easily provide targeted supplemental lessons to the students who need it most. All lessons will be related to on-grade content.
How the integration works
The MAP Growth and Reveal Math integration is designed to help streamline both decision-making and resource-finding for teachers. From the Reveal Math Digital Teacher Center, you can access recommendations from the course.
From “Recommendations,” select the unit you are currently teaching or planning to teach next.
The integration uses the most relevant instructional area data from the most recent MAP Growth administration to identify which students may have unfinished learning within the prerequisite skills needed to access the unit. For these students, you can assign a targeted skill path, which consists of personalized practice and tutorial assignments that cover the most critical prerequisite skills needed for the upcoming unit.
Targeted skill paths are meant to be completed independently and are paced to cover the prerequisite skill review in no more than 45 minutes. If students are demonstrating proficiency, the assignment will speed up, and if they need more time, the assignment will offer tutorials to reteach and support understanding. So the system saves you the time it would take to determine which students need support, what content would be most helpful for them, and where to find the best supplemental resources, leaving you with more time to interact directly with students.
You can assign a targeted skill path to students identified with unfinished learning in a prerequisite skill with a single click on the recommendations page. Of course, teachers know their students the best, so you can also assign this content to any student by clicking their name. As you gather additional classroom data, such as formative assessments, classwork, and class discussions, you can quickly add or remove students from an assignment as you see fit.
As your class progresses through the on-grade units, students work through assignments that connect the new concepts to foundational work of previous units or grades, supporting understanding and retention of the new materials. As students submit their work, teachers can see their performance in the assignments section of their Digital Teacher Center.
In addition to grouping recommendations, the Reveal Math integration also displays MAP Growth data for your entire class in the MAP Growth performance report.
This report allows you to see your class’s overall performance relative to the MAP Growth instructional areas, as well as individual student performance. Having the data in the Reveal platform allows you to easily create mixed grouping or pairings without having to go back into your MAP Growth reports.
Maximizing impact
While the integration of Reveal Math and MAP Growth data saves you time in planning, there are other reasons to make the most of the integration.
The targeted skills path content assigned to some students is designed to connect to and support the on-grade Reveal Math unit work. To maximize its effectiveness, ask questions during class discussions or use math journals to explicitly help students connect the precursor skills to the on-grade work. Support students in reflecting on the work assigned to them in the system. Are they still struggling in any areas? Do they feel they already understand some concepts in the assignment and, if so, how could they demonstrate their understanding? You can easily adjust grouping or content recommendations as you monitor student progress throughout the unit. You can find more tips on getting the most out of MAP-informed learning in my previous post, “7 ways to use MAP Growth–informed learning to challenge and engage students.”
If I knew then what I know now
As I think back to my Sunday prep work, I wonder how different it would have been with a tool like the MAP Growth and Reveal Math integration. Spending less time on grouping and searching for quality resources for differentiation would have given me more time for lesson planning and for things I struggled to find time to do, like think about my students’ individual strengths, backgrounds, and funds of knowledge.
By freeing teachers from the tedium of hunting down resources, MAP Growth and Reveal Math work together to give educators time to engage in formative assessment practices and develop rich classroom experiences for all students.
