Elementary teachers at Drummond Elementary School and middle school teachers at Remington Traditional School are piloting a new reporting system called Empower. This online reporting tool allows teachers to showcase student growth as they work on developing mastery in their learning standards. Empower supports students, parents and teachers by providing a visible guide showing a student’s progression in learning math and English language arts. This allows teachers and students to identify where a student is on their learning path and set goals for ongoing learning. Elementary schools and Remington will begin using Empower in the 2021-2022 school year with training for staff coming second semester.

Drummond teachers used the reporting system for the first time during parent-teacher conferences in October.

“The benefit of this new reporting tool is that it allows individual students to be assessed on the standards they are working on and for that information to be reported in real time,” said assistant principal Dr. Amanda Denson-Butterfield. Specific learning targets are marked as In-Progress (I) or Mastered (MAS) along a student’s individual learning path since not all students are working on the same content at the same time, and therefore are not being assessed on the same things.

“This also provides teachers with a variety of information for instructional decision-making,” Denson said.

“Empower supports Drummond’s reporting practices which do not focus on time as a constraint but rather growth over time,” instructional specialist Angie Huesgen said. “This enables students to have an individual learning plan based on their needs rather than a chronological grade or benchmark. For example, you may have a third grade student working on fifth grade math learning targets and another student in the same class working on first grade learning targets. Previous reporting systems did not allow this to be displayed for parents to see in real time.”

The overall goal of competency-based learning and the use of Empower at Drummond is to meet students where they are in their personalized learning journey. Parents were introduced to Empower during parent-teacher conferences this fall. They will soon have login access to Empower and be able to see a live visual tool that illustrates how their child is progressing.