Nurturing Curiosity Interactive

How does Ms. Tighe manage to connect with her students, cultivate curiosity, and meet all their learning needs?

Educators can filter by skills to see if specific students would benefit from the same small group work.

In just seconds, teachers can review student usage, lesson progress, and identify where students are struggling.

Reading Park Provides a Variety of Incentives to Extrinsically Motivate and Encourage Students

DreamBox Reading Park guides students toward successful and productive reading through a playful, engaging learning environment as they develop critical foundational reading skills.

Ms. Tighe reminds students that it’s okay if they don’t know answers yet, because they are going to learn a lot throughout the lessons in this Spaceship Earth unit to help them explain the phenomenon and they'll have an opportunity to change or add to their first model.

Ms. Tighe knows that not every student loves every subject, but she always works to engage her class by introducing surprising science topics that give students new ways to think about the world around them.

Click Through to See How Ms. Tighe Sets up a Social Studies Lesson for her Students in Minutes.

The Projected Growth Report helps Ms. Tighe predict each student’s proficiency level at the end of the school year, based on initial assessment data, program use, and ongoing performance.

With the Real-Time Activity Dashboard, Ms. Tighe can see what each of her students is working on and how far they have progressed each week.

The Overview page allows Ms. Tighe to view data at the class or student level.

Lucas can access immediate feedback about where he is on his learning journey, including scores for his lessons, awards he’s received, and goal-setting tools.

After reading his selection, Lucas answers ten comprehension questions. As he demonstrates mastery of key skills, the questions increase in depth and breadth of complexity.

Lucas is still working to develop fluency, so he reads within the platform’s Guided Window. The patented Guided Window moves at Lucas’ current reading rate to model and develop silent reading behaviors.

See How Reading Plus Guides Lucas Through This Selection

Ms. Tighe knows that if students aren’t interested in what they are reading, they will have a hard time being engaged. Reading Plus provides access to a wide range of informational and literary selections at each student’s “just right” level—texts that are appropriate for both their reading level and their age.

Lucas’ assessment results showed that he should focus on building and strengthening his comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency skills.

During independent reading time, Ms. Tighe has each student log into Reading Plus. When her students started this year, they took the adaptive Reading Plus assessment, Insight, which measured their motivation, vocabulary, comprehension, and silent reading fluency, and then placed them at the right levels for reading.

Ms. Tighe likes to use Virtual Field Trips from Discovery Education partners, like Polar Bears International, to connect students with new science experiences beyond the classroom walls.

As Ms. Tighe’s students learn about new careers, they can link their prior knowledge to what they learned in the video. And, as a result, connect what they’ve seen to what they already know about themselves and the world around them.

Ms. Tighe is constantly in awe of her students’ creativity and curiosity. She wants to empower them to use these skills to thrive long after they leave her classroom. She leverages content from Discovery Education’s STEM Careers Coalition™ to help her students learn how to solve problems, seek solutions, and explore careers they never imagined.

Real Students Describe Real Experiences with DreamBox Math

While Ms. Tighe is in the DreamBox Math dashboard, she takes a step back from granular data at the student level and reviews progress for her entire class.

These reports make it easy for her to determine which instructional areas to revisit with all students and identify students working on a similar conceptual path for strategic grouping. From the platform, she can immediately assign targeted lessons based on data across classroom gaps or individual students' needs.

When Ms. Tighe logs into her DreamBox Math dashboard she immediately understands where Mateo is and what he needs to grow.

When we met Ms. Tighe’s students earlier, we learned that many of them are working at different levels in math. Some are a bit behind, and some are a little ahead. Fortunately, Ms. Tighe has the right tools to provide her students with the right instruction and support—and that support is always engaging and helps students feel successful.

Ms. Tighe also spends a lot of time thinking about how she can:

Between managing competing priorities and working to inspire her students, Ms. Tighe has a lot on her plate. Fortunately, she has access to the right tools and support to help her meet these goals.

Spend an average of 11 hours per school week preparing and planning lessons.

Spend 15 minutes per school day (1.5 total hours per week) preparing reports and tracking data.

*Data based on research from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Spend 6.5 hours per week evaluating and providing feedback on student work.

*Data based on results from the Merrimack College Teacher Survey

Work an average of 54 hours per week, yet only 25 of those hours are spent directly teaching students.

Mateo missed a lot of school last year, but he’s been getting to class most days now. Unfortunately, his absences made it hard for him to feel confident about math and reading, and he’s not always excited about school.

Kaylee loves science and shows true interest in the world around her. She is always asking questions and conducting experiments.

Jackson an excellent communicator, skillful in both speaking and writing, but he thinks school is boring and especially dislikes math and science.

Ava loves reading and stories, but she struggles with math.

Erica has been struggling to make it to school every day, and because of this she is a bit behind in her reading and needs extra math support.

Lucas likes to play video games and collects rocks. He has been excelling in math this year, but he doesn’t like writing very much.

Every student is unique, so she strives to make meaningful learning experiences for all of them.

She is a fifth-grade teacher at Grandview Elementary, and is in her seventh year of teaching.

Ms. Tighe has to juggle so many competing priorities—from lesson planning and tracking student progress to differentiating instruction to meet students where they are.

Follow this interactive journey to see how a teacher inspires student learning every day.

Educators can easily navigate to student reports from their dashboards. In the skills report, teachers can quickly determine which students are mastering concepts, and which students need more support.

As students collect rewards, they can choose when to play in the Reading Park Arcade, as well as what to play in the arcade.

When a student completes a lesson, they earn a token, a Monster Friend card, or a sticker. When a student completes a Quest, they earn a Squiggle Page for their Squiggle Book. These rewards empower students to celebrate success, take pride in accomplishments, and motivate them to persevere. Mateo’s backpack contains tokens that can be exchanged to play games in the Reading Park Arcade.

Every lesson is designed to maximize each student's ability to practice and master foundational reading skills. This includes multiple interactive formats that systematically allow students to learn and practice a robust standards-based scope and sequence.

The Squiggle Book is a magic book that teaches friendly monsters in Reading Park how to read.

It's up to each student to find the pages by completing Quests. This engagement tool also serves as a companion guide for students. During their journey, students can look at the concepts from completed Quests within their Squiggle Book at any time.

Students can openly explore different areas of Reading Park and select the lessons they’d like to work through first. This agency allows each student to self-direct their learning experience.

Today, she has the whole class begin a unit on stars and the solar system with an Anchor Layer lesson. The Anchor Phenomenon introduces students to a mysterious real-world occurrence, in this case, star trails, and asks them to develop an explanation for it before any instruction takes place. It encourages them to think like scientists, wonder why, and inspires them to explore new areas.

Ms. Tighe has limited time to learn new programs, plan lessons, and take care of operational tasks for instruction. She uses Discovery Education’s Experience to access hundreds of Need to Know lessons that combine standards-aligned videos and grab-and-go activities to plan high-quality lessons fast.

Reading Plus provides Lucas with information about how his lesson went and provides Ms. Tighe a complete view of instructional growth per student and across her entire class, including real-time views of what students are working on and projected growth data.

When Lucas logs in to Reading Plus, he can see his personalized dashboard where he can track his own goals and progress over time. This visibility motivates Lucas and shows him that he has ownership over his learning.

Ms. Tighe loves to share resources with her students that offer new perspectives from experts around the world. She knows that the curated content from Discovery Education Experience is a great place to set up engaging lessons and immersive experiences that get students excited to learn more.

The content in STEM Careers Coalition allows students to learn about people who are using the same skills Ms. Tighe's class is learning today to become problem solvers that make a difference in future communities.

Mateo is a little behind in math, but he has been making a lot of progress this year. As he uses DreamBox Math, the adaptive software captures information on all his learning behavior, from how long it takes for him to answer a question to why he may have missed a question. Then, the software adjusts the learning path in real time to address his unique learning needs. This ensures that Mateo is always working at the right level and getting the right support, in every moment.

Before, during, and after the Virtual Field Trip, Ms. Tighe can pull Ready-to-Use Resources from Discovery Education Experience to build their knowledge about polar bears and the tundra ecosystem. These resources include hands-on activities, student response sheets, engaging projects, quizzes, and more.