Millennium School in San Francisco, California, is committed to providing a well-rounded, meaning-driven education for grades 6-8. In this pursuit, they have developed customized student competencies and a transdisciplinary, student-led instructional approach. However, finding a platform to support the school’s progressive philosophy has been an ongoing challenge.
This case study explores how Toddle’s customizations have helped Millennium School overcome this challenge with inflexible tech systems and enabled the school to stay true to its forward-looking instructional approach.
CHALLENGE: Inflexible systems restricted the school to adopt its unique instructional approach
Stephanie Kinkel, the school’s Integrated Academics Architect, shares, “We have always desired to be at the cutting-edge of technology and felt restricted by the lack of customizability in our previous systems. Working around those limitations held us back from fully adopting our progressive academic vision and delivering the deep, holistic learning experiences we want for our students.”
She points out, “It has been difficult to work with the typical one-size-fits-all solutions that do not cater to our school-specific requirements. For instance, being a school focused on individual student mastery, we required customizations like configuring the planner to align with school-specific competencies and providing feedback in diverse ways beyond just letters and numbers.”
“In the previous system, we were compelled to find workarounds. Our school-specific competencies were stored in a standalone Google Doc, which wasn’t linked to our lesson planners. This meant we couldn’t map the plans to competencies or track how well we were meeting them. We were looking for a tech partner who truly understands our specific needs and supports us in embracing our vision. And, Toddle fit in beautifully.” Stephanie shared.
SOLUTION & IMPACT: Toddle’s customizations have enabled the school to bring their vision of personalized, student-centered learning to life
As with all our partner schools, Millennium was paired with a dedicated Toddle Buddy, who customized the platform end to end for them, from adding school-specific competencies to planners to helping them personalize feedback and reports.
Stephanie explained, “Toddle has been instrumental in bringing our progressive vision to life with its very Millennium-specific customizations in planning and reporting. This gives our teachers, families, and potential high schools a clear delineation of which skills are mapped to what type of content and the assessment of those skills. This capability has been very helpful!”
Example 1: Integrating school-specific competencies into Toddle’s Planners
With Toddle, the school could seamlessly integrate specific competencies into planners, making it easy to map them to learning experiences.
Stephanie shared, “Customizing Toddle to include our school-specific student competencies was seamless and quick. We now have the flexibility and power to create a hierarchy of domains, map learning activities to those, and align them with personalized individual student goals. This is a huge improvement from before when we had to juggle multiple documents in different tabs just to identify and map connections. This new ability gives us visibility into student progress aligned with our school’s specific competencies throughout the year.
The convenience of selecting a competency with a single click and being able to see the overall alignment has led to a higher adoption of competencies. Now, all our learning activities are mapped with the competencies, which has significantly reduced the gaps we had noted with the previous system.”
Example 2: Providing personalized, comprehensive feedback and reports through Toddle
Millennium uses Toddle to deliver detailed, personalized feedback to students and offer self-evaluation opportunities through rubrics, all customized to each student’s strengths and abilities.
Elaborating on what it looks like in practice, Stephanie shared, “With Toddle, we have the flexibility to provide comprehensive and individualized feedback tailored to each student’s needs. For example, we can use audio notes for students who require extra reading support, while advanced learners can self-evaluate using customized rubrics. This approach offers deep, personalized guidance.
To add, the built-in presence of Toddle AI has helped reduce our workload, making us more present with our students. For example, we can put in a few anecdotes about a student and generate something that is cohesive and our voice and tone. Or, we can make this more extensive by suggesting specifics of how we would like the narrative to sound – warm, compassionate, and encouraging, or firm and clear and concise. This allows us to not lose that touch of personalization and have an authentic expression. The system knows who is writing this narrative and for whom. Truly remarkable!”
Lastly, our new Toddle-led system has empowered our teachers to provide feedback and track observations aligned with the specific skills in real-time. This capability has significantly improved teachers’ ability to monitor student progress toward personalized goals, leading to noticeable shifts in student agency and engagement. As a result, we’ve seen more students are now able to set and meet their personalized learning goals, and we couldn’t be more proud!”
Stephanie concluded, “Switching to Toddle was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made to meet our specific needs. This shift has made us rethink our instructional design, making our teaching far more effective.
Our teachers are no longer trying to fit a square peg in a round hole; they can now focus their energies and time on offering deeper learning opportunities. And our students are much more engaged and participative, too, as reflected in their discussions and the quality of their work. So thankful for this partnership!”
