TEG and the state of Tennessee partner to improve the teaching and learning experience for more than 65,000 teachers and over one million students.
Tennessee’s Best for All strategic plan depends on providing high-quality, standards-aligned resources and professional development statewide on an easily accessible online platform.
To do this, the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE), through the nonprofit Tennessee SCORE, engaged TEG to deploy a custom-configured Standards & Materials Navigator platform. The Navigator provides TDOE users access to Tennessee’s Curriculum Frameworks and aligned lessons, activities, classroom and professional development resources. Teachers and district administrators have a “one-stop shop” for all of the TDOE guidance and support for the standards and materials used in every classroom statewide.
The Challenge
The majority of traditional teacher professional development is not connected or aligned in any way to specific classroom standards. Unfortunately, this means that the resources provided through professional development are out-of-context to a teacher's day-to-day classroom experience.
As part of the TDOE Best for All plan, the state seeks to provide teachers with an easy-to-use platform that aligns professional development and associated curriculum to the student learning standards and statewide assessments. Because of the emergency needs of the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic response, TDOE additionally needed a technical architecture to support the access to and delivery of standards-based digital content to enable distance-learning solutions.
The Solution
TEG worked together with the TDOE to customize a TDOE-specific configuration for the deployment of our Standards & Materials Navigator. Additionally, as part of the project, TEG delivered an online discovery platform for TDOE to address digital content access related to “At Home” learning during COVID-19 school closures.
The TDOE Standards & Materials Navigator allows TDOE to provide entire Scope & Sequence support for all subjects and all grades in one simple, unified interface. Utilizing TEG’s award-winning competency-framework tools, TDOE subject-matter experts can quickly create and manage content that is standards-aligned, and organize content in the ways that make the most sense to real classroom educators.
Whether teachers need to view content via standards, text or publisher (“Scope”), or by grade and time of year (“Sequence”), the TDOE Standards & Materials Navigator gives them an innovative and simple way to find instructional resources, PD strategies, lesson plans and assessment items that are directly aligned to the State Standards of learning - making a clear connection between standards and curricula, and how learning and student achievement is actually assessed at the state level.
Final details
Best for All Central will serve as Tennessee's online hub for best-in-class, standards-based instructional and professional development materials —all designed to be easily accessible, searchable and free. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, TEG and the TNDOE made the launch of this tool a top priority to support Tennessee’s districts, educators, and families - and it will be used extensively throughout the 2020/2021 academic year and beyond.