With nearly 15 years of experience with the IB, Raffles World Academy has an international population of over 1700 students across 85 nationalities and an equally diverse, fast-growing, academic and administrative team.
The school’s PYP coordinator, Yolanda Maccallum, shares, “We were always proud of how closely knit our family-teacher community was, and how we supported each other in practicing the PYP better. But as the school started to scale up, we needed to streamline our practices to make sure we had enough visibility to be able to contribute to each other’s journeys. This is where Toddle came in handy. Not only were we able to share planners, student portfolios, key announcements, and report cards, all in one place, but also foster a deeper understanding of the PYP along the way!”
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Raffles World Academy Case Study
“Toddle’s planners set a standard structure for our unit plans across 8 grade levels”
With close to one hundred educators working across 8 grade levels in the PYP, the teaching team at Raffles World Academy found it difficult to reinforce a standard structure for their school’s planners. Yolanda shares, “When we previously used a common drive, we had to juggle hundreds of planning templates, and would spend hours trying to locate the right one – sometimes only to find out that we didn’t have access to it! And even if we did have access, making sense of the different sections of the planner and contributing our ideas was another challenge. Our specialist teachers often had many great ideas for subject integrations, but were not always able to put them to action because the planner didn’t provide enough information on the central idea or the lines of inquiry that the homeroom teacher was envisioning. You’d think leaving suggestions on the planner would help, but we faced multiple formatting issues and even tended to overwrite each other’s work.”
“With Toddle, our teachers could automatically access each other’s planners at any time of the year and collaborate on unit plans in real time. As a coordinator, I also loved how well-structured Toddle’s planners were. Right at the beginning, the planners prompted us to set the central idea, learner profile attributes, and other learning goals for the unit, and then in the subsequent sections, we could document the learning experiences and reflect on the successes and improvements for these learning experiences. This helped our teachers gain context about each other’s units and form stronger transdisciplinary connections. We could even use the chat interface within the planner to leave comments and suggestions without overwriting each other’s work. All this meant that our unit plans across grade levels now had a common structure that was fully aligned with the IB!”
“The Toddle Student Journal helped us educate families organically”
With Toddle’s Student Journal, the teachers at Raffles World Academy were able to document and showcase their students’ everyday work to families and connect them meaningfully to PYP’s learning goals. Yolanda elaborates, “Before Toddle, we used to spend hours running parent sessions explaining the PYP terminology to them. In addition to being time consuming, the process usually had little effect because working parents were often unable to attend these sessions and would find some of the concepts as being too theoretical for them.”
“Through the Toddle Student Journal, we were able to tag each piece of student work to PYP learning goals, and therefore help families see learning in action through their children’s work. We didn’t need to spend hours explaining the importance of being inquirers or reflective, they could observe these skills in action as they gained a window into their children’s day-to-day work! This kind of organic communication has opened up a better understanding to families and even students about why, where, and how we hit the PYP elements. Moreover, because families now had a point of reference, they were able to use the same language as we did in the classroom, and have more meaningful discussions about their children’s learning journeys.”
“Toddle’s evaluation dashboard revamped our approach towards IB visits!”
With Toddle’s evaluation dashboard, the leadership team at Raffles World Academy could organise their evidences automatically and in an ongoing manner, and therefore adopt a smarter way to prepare for their evaluation visit. Yolanda explains, “In the past, the weeks leading up to evaluation were so stressful for our teachers. We had to collate hundreds of paper folders, organise them manually based on standards and practices, and then engage in back-and-forth emails and calls to review the evidence we had collected. We hardly ever looked forward to the process.”
“With Toddle’s evaluation dashboard, evidence collection became a regular practice at our school. We were able to tag student work and other evidence to suitable standards and practices as and when we collected them, instead of waiting until a few weeks before the visit. Furthermore, since all of this evidence was automatically organised in one place, the review process was a lot faster and easier. We could simply scroll through the list of evidence that our teachers had added at different points in the year, leave our comments, or even suggest alternate evidence – all within the dashboard. This way, we were able to create a fantastic bank of evidence for our year of self-study as well as for the evaluation which went delightfully well!”
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Get free access to the detailed
Raffles World Academy Case Study
