During testing season (and all year long), some of our newest platform features can help make test prep a little less stressful for teachers, and a little more fun for students. Keep reading to find out how Read to Lead offers a fresh take on test prep in middle schools!

Engage Students in Relatable, Rigorous and Immersive Content

With Read to Lead, students immerse themselves in engaging storylines and work through complex decision-making processes. What advice do you give a student pharmacist about to graduate who is torn between two career paths? How do you balance a patient’s personal wishes against medical recommendations when it comes to taking a vaccine against COVID? In the wake of a hurricane, what is the best way to mobilize resources to help those in need?

In this interactive, game-based platform, students take on the role of a leader in an organization and navigate real-life scenarios in a virtual workplace. Each game completed on the platform is the equivalent of reading 3,000 – 5,000 words, and students develop literacy and life skills through standards-aligned gameplay. The games also include formative assessments that are differentiated to each student’s ability level and aligned to Common Core ELA standards. If you’re looking for fun, rigorous, and engaging test-prep material, Read to Lead has you covered!

Use Real-Time Performance Reports to Know Where Each Student Stands 

Part of the test prep process is keeping track of students’ performance so that you know where to differentiate learning and can step in to lend a hand when needed. But grading hundreds of student assessments is time-consuming and tedious.

Read to Lead allows you to spend less time grading with formative assessments that are automatically graded within the platform. Formative assessments are a useful tool for teachers to gauge student understanding and ability during the learning process, so that they can better cater to student needs. With this in mind, Read to Lead is designed with several features to help teachers track ELA growth.

The Gradebook feature shows how each student performed in each game and where they might need more practice or support. Get an overview of the class performance, or z oom in to each individual student for more detailed insights about their performance. Within the Gradebook view, teachers can review each individual student’s work to clearly understand students’ particular strengths and weaknesses. All reports can easily be saved as a PDF, printed out for quick reference, or emailed out as needed. With this deep understanding of where they stand, you can more effectively support your students to achieve better results during testing season.

The platform also allows you to generate Performance Reports not only for English Language Arts (ELA) skills but also Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in real-time so you always have a pulse on how each student is progressing. For a deeper dive at the class level, you can also choose to select specific ELA or SEL competencies from the dropdown menu. By selecting the skill you want to focus on, you can easily see at a glance how many students performed at the different levels – Beginner, Progressing, Strong, or Not Attempted. Additionally, you can track trends in your class performance based on specific ELA skills and evaluate how your class is performing over time.

Easily Differentiate Learning to Reach Students Where They Are

Every class has students of different needs and abilities, but this year, in particular, the differences are much more pronounced with students coming in after two years of remote and hybrid learning. It is not unusual to find a varied range of understanding or capabilities for different skills within a single class. That’s why many teachers are incorporating differentiated learning in their classrooms. But with over 25 students in each class, it’s hard to provide individual attention to each, and besides, who has time to create that many customized lesson plans?  

That’s why we created the Game Recommendations feature for Read to Lead games. Meet each student at their level and help them build their literacy and leadership skills gradually by using this incredible feature. Within the Performance Report tab, head over to Skill Insights to see the learning games the platform recommends for your students. The platform automatically takes into consideration their past performance and the skills they need more practice with to recommend suitable games, so you can be sure that your students will be effectively prepared for the testing season.

Test prep can be challenging, but with Read to Lead, you can make this whole process fun and effective, both for your students and yourself! Getting started with Read to Lead is easy – simply sign up for a free educator account, and dive right into your students’ best testing season yet! Click here to sign up for Read to Lead!