La Scuola International School is a PreK-8 school in San Francisco inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach to pedagogy.The school believes that every child is capable of being a partner in their learning, and is committed to inspiring brave learners to shape the future.
Their technology coordinator, Chiara Fornetti shares, “We’ve always believed that students, teachers, and families are equally important to our school community, and we wanted the technology we used to be reflective of this philosophy. When we used our previous LMS for unit planning, we still had to use several other platforms like Google Classroom and Google Docs to collaborate with students and families, and couldn’t really involve them in curriculum planning as closely as we wanted to.”
“With Toddle, not only were we able to co-plan more cohesive lesson plans with students and families, but we could also connect them to daily learning experiences, portfolios, report cards, and family communication, all from one interface.”
“Our previous LMS offered structure, but Toddle has offered structured creativity”
Before switching to Toddle, the teachers at La Scoula found themselves regulating new ideas just because their planning platform wasn’t flexible and supportive enough. Chiara explains, “With our previous LMS, our teachers were so often put off by its outdated interface, that they used the planners very occasionally and only to document their units from a compliance perspective. New teachers were easily overwhelmed by the number of boxes and found it challenging to identify which parts of the planner they needed to fill out and when. Sometimes they would even tend to fill in only the overarching planning bits, and just provide bare minimum information in the rest of the sections.”
“Toddle on the other hand has made planning a healthy habit in our school! Our teachers took an instant liking to Toddle’s visual planners and therefore engaged in the planning process with more intent and creativity. Right at the beginning, there were stepwise visual prompts to help us align on the bigger ideas of a unit. And in the next sections, we also had the tools needed to get creative and design engaging learning experiences, and targeted summative and formative assessments. Being able to view everything from overarching learning goals to subject-specific assessments on one visually intuitive interface has definitely raised the bar for our units!”
“We could collaborate during the planning process rather than after!”
The inbuilt chat interface in Toddle’s planners helped teachers at La Scuola engage in real time collaborative planning, as opposed to sharing occasional updates. Chiara elaborates, “Before Toddle, our teachers had to create separate documents or emails or wait until our planning meetings to suggest ideas for each other’s units. This meant that we would sometimes overlook seemingly less important suggestions like a skill, classroom strategy, , or relevant disciplinary idea the unit could have touched upon. Eventually, these little things started to add up to make our units less interdisciplinary and cohesive than we wanted them to be.”
“On Toddle, the fact that we could collaborate and brainstorm ideas from within the planner was a revelation for us! Anytime we had a suggestion for a fellow teacher’s unit, no matter how big or small, we could simply leave a comment or audio note in the relevant section of the planner, and the teacher was notified instantly! Eventually, our teachers were drawn to the ease with which they could collaborate on Toddle, and started to engage in more creative discussions about subject integration and teaching practices.”
“Unit planning turned from being siloed to seamless with Toddle”
Automatic evidence collection in Toddle’s planners helped the teachers at La Scuola scaffold their lessons and support differentiated learning in their students. “When we planned units on our previous LMS, we still had to use Google Classroom to implement these units with students, and Google Docs to create report cards. And since these platforms didn’t talk with each other, we had very limited visibility on evidence of learning. Most of our ongoing or post-unit reflections involved recalling student feedback and evaluations from memory, and this was certainly not an effective way to identify and solve for learning gaps.”
“With Toddle, we could seamlessly connect unit plans to classroom learning, portfolios, and family communication – all in one place. We were able to share units and lesson plans with students and families at the click of a button. And once students responded, we could automatically capture their work back into the unit planner as evidence of learning! This kind of seamless integration between planning and action has helped us engage in more informed unit reflections, and therefore support well-differentiated teaching and learning.”
About Toddle
Toddle is an all-in-one teaching-learning platform. Loved by 40,000+ educators around the world, Toddle empowers teachers to work together and better for curriculum planning, student portfolios, assessments, reports, and family communication – all from one intuitive interface!
