We are so excited to finally get back to school and deploy our certified teachers into their Elevate classrooms across the country! While families have been getting themselves back-to-school ready, we at Elevate have been preparing ourselves, too, to make sure we’re equipping our educational partners to have their most successful school year yet.
We’ve done a lot of big-picture rearranging on our end to make sure that Elevate partners are starting with a certified teacher on day one as often as possible. We’re dedicating our efforts to better anticipating our schools’ and districts’ needs and allocating our resources to best fill the vacancies they have. Our goal is seamless delivery for all Elevate programs, and Elevaters are working every day to get closer and closer to it!
Similarly, we’ve also improved our teacher onboarding so they are even more prepared and ready to go the minute they meet their students! Part of this new onboarding includes targeted training on keeping classes and lessons engaging for students. That relationship between a teacher and their students is so crucial, and we’re helping our teachers become even more open about encouraging students to participate and join in on that connection.
We also spent our summer auditing the experience in an Elevate classroom to ensure that our teachers and platforms are engaging and our students are empowered. One big improvement that came from this audit is an update to our Elevate rubrics that better reflect students’ perspectives of our classes and how exciting and engaging they are.
Part of our new and improved engagement tools include more cooperative learning activities and fresh new unit openers that get students geared in the right direction from the very beginning of a lesson! With these, we’ve also added new optional grading activities so teachers can ensure that adequate progress is being made within lessons. Where historically a QZ could be used as a graded quiz, we’ve now established new bite-sized assessments within OTUS, so that the grading opportunity exists, but the QZ can serve as just a pulse check within the class period to inform a teacher’s lesson plan.
One of the improvements we’re most excited about this year is our reviewed curriculum. In order to keep Elevate in the highest quality order we can, we took some time to review the state-level criteria in each of our states and close any gaps in standards.
We want to encourage genuine understanding of concepts, so with this new process, students don’t get points off for not immediately scoring well on a QZ, and they’re met instead with an opportunity to learn more and strengthen their understanding before testing concepts for a grade. In order to keep reinforcing this understanding of concepts, we’ve also enhanced our assessments within OTUS to add more questions and help assess higher levels of cognition.
This school year is shaping up to be a great one, and we are so excited to kick off another season of learning and deploy our new and improved process updates to help Elevate partners and students achieve their best!
Still have vacancies for 2022-2023? Contact us at [email protected] to learn more about how we can solve your teacher shortages!