Special Education Teams,
We are grateful to partner with you to deliver high-quality, individualized education for your most complex learners. TeachTown is committed to providing the best-in-class special education solutions for your students with moderate to severe disabilities and the special education teams who serve them. We are focused exclusively on you!
To further support the invaluable work you do every day, we have made significant curriculum and platform investments over the past year and a half, including a near 400% increase in our engineering & technical teams. Additionally, we have made several strategic enhancements to our curriculum based on the voices that matter most – special education teachers and leaders.
You now have access to a K-12 adapted core curriculum, lesson flexibility, standards-based reporting, breaking news resources, an in-app onboarding explorer, a new professional development program, and much more. In this first annual product newsletter, we share the key developments of the 2022-2023 school year and preview a few exciting things on the horizon. Let’s dive in!
Margaret Lawless, Chief Product Officer
enCORE High School launched in the summer of 2022 with phase I of its 6-phase rollout, making enCORE a complete K-12 solution for districts. enCORE High School includes the following subdomains:
In May, enCORE High School Phase 4 launched ahead of schedule! Phase 4 included all content for Units 73-75 and Units 91-93. A few literature highlights to note –
enCORE High School Phase 5 will roll out by the end of August, and Phase 6 will be completed at the end of November.
We heard your feedback – you needed the ability to appropriately challenge students by differentiating the level of rigor across subject areas and units. Now, our lesson flexibility allows teachers to assign different units and levels to students for different domains.
For example, a 3rd grade student may access Level 1 Math content and Level 2 ELA content. Similarly, a student can be working on Unit 24 in Social Studies and Unit 31 in Science if that is the most appropriate instruction for students at the time.
This highly-requested feature, initially available only to enCORE High School users, allows all teachers to provide the individualized differentiation their students need.
We added Science and Social Studies content to each of the 36 units of instruction in enCORE Elementary in response to teacher feedback. This expanded content included 5 additional newsletters with corresponding comprehension questions as well as 5 additional worksheets per unit. There is also a mini lesson that states the learning objectives covered and the suggested order of use.
Our curriculum team is always listening to customer feedback to ensure teachers are equipped with everything they need to deliver a high-quality, appropriately challenging education. In addition to the extra social studies and science content added for enCORE Elementary, we also built out Skills Review Units for enCORE Middle. Now teachers have access to additional content to reinforce foundational ELA, Math, Social Studies, and Science skills.
enCORE Events are accessible news stories based on timely, real-world current events, such as Chinese New Year, the Super Bowl, or Women’s History Month.
This spring, we launched This Just In! to complement enCORE Events. Designed to address national and global news stories that students may learn about in their everyday lives, This Just In! helps teachers share breaking news with their students as timely events occur. This Just In! provides the essential background knowledge and vocabulary necessary for students to be active consumers of mainstream media. Available for K-12.
Every year, enCORE releases brand new content for Extended School Year (ESY) in May. ESY 2023 is Summer In My Community and was released to all current enCORE users on May 15, 2023.
ESY is a 4-week curriculum and each week includes newsletters, mini-lessons, printable worksheets, and teacher-led & student-led technology lessons. Teachers can deliver appropriately challenging and engaging instruction that is relevant to students’ lives as they continue learning over the summer months! Just like enCORE K-12, enCORE ESY is standards-aligned, differentiated, and supports a blended learning model.
Note: enCORE High School launched its first-ever ESY content this May!
Teachers and administrators need access to clear, accurate data on student progress towards standards when progress monitoring, updating IEP goals and IEP progress reports, and planning targeted instruction.
This is why we released the brand new Standard Alignment for Student Work report for all enCORE users. The standards-based reporting feature allows teachers to demonstrate and analyze progress on lessons associated with state and/or national standards frameworks. Parameters can be set by subdomain, grade, date range, and standards framework. Student work progress is documented as In Progress, Passed At Pretest, or Mastered. Available for K-12.
Compliance just got a lot easier!
Our Research team was hard at work this school year formally studying the effectiveness of enCORE Elementary, and the results prove what we already knew: enCORE works!
The teacher in the study successfully delivered grade-aligned academic content and individualized instruction to meet the diverse learning needs of all students in a K-5 self-contained classroom. The students in the study gained, retained, and generalized targeted ELA and Math skills over a 6-month period.
Special education teachers and leaders can be confident that the adapted core curriculum they’re utilizing with their K-12 students with moderate to severe disabilities is best-in-class – supported by formal research and grounded in evidence-based instructional practices.
As of January 1, 2023, enCORE is offered as a K-12 solution! enCORE teachers now have access to all grade bands, regardless of the grade(s) they teach. When districts choose the package, they have access to a full suite of special education solutions – our adapted core curriculum and key supporting interventions that together support the whole child.
Additionally, TeachTown is proud to support the continuity of service with license flexibility. Each student’s account provides access to as many teachers, paraprofessionals, service providers, etc. as desired. The backend of TeachTown streamlines and automates the licensing process, simplifying onboarding and implementation.
TeachTown supports multiple integrations, including Single Sign-On (SSO) and Rostering via Clever, OneRoster, and ClassLink.
We are continuously working toward a turnkey administration. We now offer automation, bulk import updates, editable student IDs, single sign on to all of our apps, admin-viewing options, and continuous page performance updates. We reduced the number of clicks to simplify your experience with the TeachTown platform.
In early June, we launched the Resource Center to guide your experience as you navigate the platform. Through this onboarding explorer, you can find answers to the most commonly asked questions, video and text tutorials to help you get started, product walkthroughs, and quick pop-ups to see what’s new – all without ever leaving the app!
Our recently launched technical support page has improved the support workflow to automate case creation, case assignments, services level, and priority escalation. That’s tech speak for “Ping us with a question and we’re on it ASAP.” Contact information for support is available on our website and shown here.
Our brand new benchmark assessments are set to release this summer. Benchmark assessments are designed to monitor student progress on an individual skill over time and show student growth. enCORE Elementary (K-5) teachers will soon have access to ELA and Math benchmark assessments.
Assessments will be offered in teacher-delivered technology lessons, student-led technology lessons, and PDFs. All benchmark reports will provide raw score, percentage, and item analysis and direct teachers to the units in enCORE that will drive progress on students’ skill levels.
Planned to release in Fall 2023, our new Transition to Adulthood package, appropriate for students ages 18 -22, will include additional curriculum to support transition skills, social skills, and functional academic skills. Stay tuned for more details on how we are supporting the whole child approach for transition age students as they prepare for their postsecondary setting.
With a Fall 2023 target release date, the Pre-K Package will now include Social Skills alongside our play-based learning solution, Meta-Play, as well as TeachTown Basics.
The beginning of the school year is a busy time for special education administrators – compliance review, new teacher training, student schedules, and so much more.
At the start of SY 23-24, TeachTown will do the heavy lifting around student data management so administrators can focus on being present with their teachers and students. By August, administrators will be able to bulk import & export student & teacher lists; identify duplicate students & merge when appropriate; automate licensing, and more.
We’ve built the data management and integration tools to support a streamlined start to your new school year.
Exciting news! This fall, the TeachTown platform is getting an all new look and feel to support easier and more intuitive access to the curriculum. Teachers will love the simplified click paths and visually appealing layout within the homepage and curriculum tabs to find the desired lesson plans/lesson segments and plan their instruction.
We are grateful to partner with you to deliver high-quality, individualized education for your most complex learners. TeachTown is committed to providing the best-in-class special education solutions for your students with moderate to severe disabilities and the special education teams who serve them. We are focused exclusively on you.