Education Perfect supports
student agency at Takapuna
Normal Intermediate School

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Takapuna Normal Intermediate School (TNIS) has invested time and energy embedding Education Perfect into core subjects across Years 7 and 8, particularly into the Maths Department, with an eye on mirroring this approach across other curriculum areas. Rebecca Phillips, former HOD Maths and a teacher at TNIS for over a decade, provides insight into the benefits of consolidating digital tools across a school and within departments.

SCHOOL

Takapuna Normal Intermediate School

EP Subscriptions

EP Essentials

Country

New Zealand

Curriculum

New Zealand

TNIS provides a learner-centred environment for its approximately 650 Year 7 and 8 students. Located in Auckland, New Zealand, the school focuses on creating a personalised, future-focused curriculum that empowers students to be leaders of their own
learning.

To support this focus, Education Perfect (EP) has been embedded into Maths, English, Languages and Inquiry. EP, a comprehensive digital toolkit, contains learning, assessment and analytics features across a range of global subjects and curriculums. For more information on the platform’s resources, explore the company’s homepage.

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The Challenge

TNIS’ leadership wanted to address the use of multiple online platforms across core subjects and a lack of consistency of coverage between classrooms within subject areas. TNIS’ vision was that all teachers would use the same digital platform to support teaching across core subjects. With a long-term focus, the school intended for EP’s content and assessments to align with TNIS’ progressions through the core curriculum levels. EP was quickly identified as an online platform that could readily meet these objectives.

Solution

Staff were supported with training by two ‘champion’ teachers. Rebecca Phillips was tasked with leading the integration of EP into the Maths Department. Quote: “I invested a significant amount of time working through EP to identify and create pre- and post-tests, and align the EP content with our own progressions. I used the tagging functionality built into EP to label assessments and tasks. For example, activities related to place value were tagged as ‘Progression 1’.” – Rebecca Phillips

As a result, the teachers, and Rebecca, could pull individual and whole class reports to see who needed further support with particular progressions. They could then organise face-to- face workshops or assign further EP activities. “I like how all the class and individual reports are displayed in one area, and are very visual and easy to understand,” Rebecca says. “We can see straight away if a whole class needs support with something. We empower the students too, providing scaffolding as required to help them understand the reports, highlighting what needs work in red and orange, and where they have achieved in green.”

The result of Rebecca’s hard work is that EP is now fully integrated across TNI’s maths provision. “We are enjoying the ease of use, the consistency of approach, that everything is marked for us, and that we can easily interpret the reports. It has become a road map for the department.”

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The Impact

Due to EP’s integration, TNIS has successfully achieved their vision of consolidation.

“Now that we are consistently and frequently undertaking assessments in the same platform, the students genuinely understand what level they are at and, more importantly, what that means. For some, that has been a real wake up call, but at the same time, [students] know how they can progress and they can see their growth over time. EP has encouraged a real sense of ownership of learning amongst the majority of the students.”

Within subject areas, consistency of coverage has also been realised. “We all appreciate the single log in and it makes life much easier for new teachers and relievers. The fact that it works seamlessly on all devices and with Google Classroom and our Chromecasts is also a plus.”

“All the teachers are using it. Rather than different classes doing different things, everyone is covering the same content and we can access comparative insights into our progress, enabling us to identify and understand where we need to provide support, be it at class level or by differentiating for individual students.”

Summary

Takapuna Normal Intermediate School has reduced the number of digital platforms used across the school and has reaped many benefits, including increased student ownership of learning, greater insights into student achievement gaps, and more consistent coverage within curricula. EP’s single platform and user-friendly navigation saves students the effort of committing several logins to memory, and saves teachers time that they can then recommit to developing student relationships. The platform has allowed TNIS to streamline classroom lessons by integrating existing content with EP’s customisable features. As a result, as EP’s functionality continues to grow, so will the benefits that TNIS can reap.