1. GET UP AND RUNNING! Hopefully by now, school has started and you've had the opportunity of getting all your students online and logged into their Penda Learning accounts. As a teacher, you may have even assigned a few activities for your students to work on while becoming familiar with how Penda Learning works.
2. ADMINISTER A FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT. As a best practice, consider administering a formative assessment to your students to gain an understanding for what they already know at mastery level (80 - 100%), developing level (60 - 80%), or do not know (0 - 59%). Each question should be anchored to an academic standard/benchmark, so during data analysis you can prioritize standards from lowest to highest performing. Don't have test-style questions available? Be sure to check out your State Department of Education's website for item specifications and sample questions released. Oftentimes, these are high quality questions that have been written and vetted by education experts of which you can now use to save yourself time.
3. ANALYZE THE DATA. Formative assessment data is more than just giving student a pre-test via bubble sheet to then later compare a post-test against. This data is invaluable to prioritizing the scope and sequence of your curriculum (or academic standards needing to be reviewed while teaching your core curriculum) as well as helping you to understand the breath and depth of which you may need to instruct on various academic standards, concepts, or topics. After administering a formative assessment to your students, it's critical to take time to analyze data to understand 3 key components - how many groups of students do you have within your class period, who are they, and what intervention should you put in place.
4. CREATE CLASSROOM INTERVENTION GROUPS WITHIN PENDA. Did you know that you can create infinite 'classroom intervention groups' within your Penda teacher account in order to group students of like ability level? By doing so you can now take your entire class period and strategically group students within, for example, 3 classroom intervention groups (low, medium, high / red, yellow, green). Doing so unlocks other features and functionality of Penda Learning to help make life easier for teachers. This includes being able to differentiate instruction easily with just a few clicks by assigning different activities to your different classroom intervention groups, and continuously progress-monitoring each of the classroom intervention groups in just 3 clicks.
