As edtech evolves, the greatest challenge lies not in building tools but in creating effective solutions that address real classroom challenges. But, this only happens when you work directly with educators early and often in the product development cycle, incorporating their unique insights around learning to co-build impactful solutions.
Our Along team put this approach into practice.
Research shows that students who have positive relationships with their teachers are more likely to feel motivated and engaged in school, develop positive social and emotional competencies, and perform better academically.
With these findings, the Along team partnered with Gradient Learning to co-build with teachers, youth-focused organizations, and researchers. These collaborations were essential in ensuring the content in Along — a teacher-student connection tool — was responsive to the diversity of student experiences in school.
Each collaborator brought a unique lens to the creation process. For example, the Along team partnered with Black Teacher Collaborative to make Along culturally informed and racially affirming; our partners at Understood worked with us on the tool’s accessibility to ensure it met the needs of students with learning differences and exceptional learning needs, who comprise 20% of learners. Teacher leaders from Teach Plus helped in the development process to make Along’s content implementable for educators.
Incorporating teacher feedback to improve Along
Schools are now successfully using Along to build connections and trust between teachers and students. In a recent case study with Rochester Public Schools, 81% of teachers said that Along helped them be more open with their students, and 83% of students said that Along helped their teacher get to know them.
With those early successes in hand, the Along team knew it was important to also drive student engagement and motivation to accelerate learning and positive student outcomes.
With that focus in mind, the team went through a multi-stage research and design effort. They worked alongside 40 school leaders and 130 teachers from around the country, in person and over Zoom, to discuss new features for Along and test activities for co-building together. This culminated in an intensive, daylong co-building workshop in partnership with Leanlab Education and a cohort of teachers and school leaders from six Kansas City schools to brainstorm and imagine products that addressed their most pressing classroom pain points.
Collectively, the group honed how to better extend Along’s capabilities to capture student voice, ensure that mechanisms are in place for teachers to be responsive to what students share, and provide teachers with insights that help incorporate student input into classroom instruction.
Launching the updated Along
With these new educator insights, Along launched a series of new features for the 2023-2024 school year. In addition to providing more ways to incorporate student voice, the tool is now even easier to adopt by individual educators and school-wide and helps teachers tailor their instruction to improve academic outcomes and create a more engaging classroom.
Our collaborations with educators are ongoing: in-person visits and calls with Along users over the course of the first semester resulted in additional improvements to help support student learning, and encouraged feedback from teachers on how these updates are helping them build stronger connections with their students.
Announcing Render, our new edtech innovation studio
The collaborative co-building process pioneered with Along has become a successful and fruitful model for developing additional tools that center on educators’ insights, ideas, and input. At CZI, we’re proud to scale this approach via our new education technology innovation studio, Render.
With Render, we will continue to expand our partnerships with educators, incorporating their unique insights about learning to co-build effective solutions that positively impact students and teachers.
