importance of building units

Background

In our research for Class Mastery, we found there is a certain order that standards are taught as some of them are dependent on one another within the school year.

We needed to provide a way in which teachers could document when Standards would be taught so that they have access to relevant information which would also help them prioritize more effectively.

We used site visits in August to understand how teachers go about prepping for the school year.

Unsurprisingly, we found that teachers use scope and sequence in conjunction with the unit plan to create weekly lessons. We brought back resources which helped inform our work on units.

EXPLORATION

Flexible Units

Our goal was to digitally document units (groups of standards) to give teachers a timeline of when standards would be introduced.

This was essential because there was no way in our product to group standards and pull insights about a class quickly, so it was a very manual process for our districts.

Our initial attempt organized standards in a Kanban design to give teachers the flexibility to roll standards over into another unit. However, this was visually overwhelming with unnecessary functionality. Teachers didn’t feel like they’d be spending a lot of time reorganizing units, but they would spend a lot of time on the class breakdown pages of the standards within the units.

ITERATE

Filtering

We learned that units were set at the beginning of the year and weren’t changed often. Teachers mainly used units to reduce the number of standards they had to focus on during a particular period of time.

It seemed that teachers mainly needed a way to filter standards rather than having another workflow. We explored more simple ways of viewing units and spent more effort to filter the standards.