Achievable Dream Academy: Empowering Students Through Conversational Classrooms
An Achievable Dream Academy, located in Newport News, VA, diligently supports K-12 students face challenging socio-economic factors, ensuring they not only succeed but flourish in their educational journey.
In partnership with their city, their public school district, and local businesses, AADA is on a mission to provide a unique, challenging, disciplined academic environment; to challenge and motivate all students to exceed their own expectations; and to light their students’ way for success in work and in life.
Meaningful, equitable conversation is integral to each part of that mission.
Principal Terra Chalmers-Harris brought TeachFX into her school to help support that mission by helping teachers engage students in insightful discourse in all content areas.
Integrating TeachFX with new curricula
AADA recently implemented both a new math curriculum and a new reading curriculum. The literacy-based program LETRS, provides professional learning for teachers with a focus on the science of reading, phonological awareness, and vocabulary fluency.
But, while new curricula can change what teachers are teaching, Principal Chalmers-Harris saw the need to help teachers change how they were teaching.
Rather than TeachFX being one more thing on top of full plates, TeachFX became the missing piece to tie it all together.
Engaging teachers in their own learning through personalized professional development cycles
In five sessions over the course of the school year, AADA teachers worked with TeachFX educators in professional development designed for them and their classrooms.
They explored practices of reflecting on student discourse in their own classrooms, facilitating meaningful instructional conversations, and use of questioning and wait time as levers for facilitating equitable classroom conversations.
Creating continuous learning, customized to each classroom, with PD + the instructional coaching app
In between each PD session, teachers used the TeachFX instructional coaching app to see a complete picture of what was happening in their classrooms – and what was changing in their teaching.
Teachers could see clearly how much student talk was happening, as well as the specific teaching practices that helped engage more students’ voices in the conversation.
Teachers felt like they had their own personal coach to help them see what to focus on a bit more, what to do more of or change in their own practice.
Using the app, teachers became more mindful of how their own questioning techniques were helping to create conversation with their students. They could see clearly which questions were helping to draw students into the conversation, whether asking a different question at a different point in the lesson could engage more students’ voices, or even that they might be calling on certain students more than others.
And, teachers could hear in moments of classroom conversation which pieces of the content might need a bit more focus in the following lesson.
Plus, TeachFX is able to provide instructional leaders with school-wide data, while teachers’ own class reports remain private.
Seeing the real data on school-wide student talk trends allowed Terra and her assistant principals to see at a high level what was changing in their classrooms and where they might want to focus future professional development efforts to fit their teachers best.
The more AADA teachers used TeachFX, the more student talk increased
With 44 teachers using TeachFX, Achievable Dream’s average student talk time in the classroom surpassed both the average across all educators using TeachFX and reached five times the national average.
And, as is the case with many of our partners, the more teachers used TeachFX in their classrooms the more they increased student talk and decreased teacher talk time.
The future of PD, powered by AI
With TeachFX, Principal Chalmers and her teachers know that their efforts are facilitating more meaningful, equitable dialogue in their classrooms — and that those conversations are supporting their mission to help every student surpass their own expectations.
And while there is always the potential to improve teaching and learning even further, the teachers’ learnings from TeachFX professional development sessions and AI-powered instructional coaching app have spurred measurable growth over the course of the school year.
Administrators & Coaches
Classroom Teachers
