There’s a writer waiting to be discovered in every student.
TenMarks Education is education software for K-12 providing differentiated instruction to unlock each student’s potential through self-paced practice. It provides solutions to help teachers chart each student’s learning pathway and personalize their work with leveled assignments, realtime interventions and strategies for expanding understanding.
Role
As Head of Product for English Language Arts, I expanded TenMarks Education's personalized learning program, used in over 85% of U.S. school districts for math, by defining and building a new product category for writing. Using primary research, I defined vision, strategy, requirements, roadmap, and go-to-market plan for a new suite of products designed to coach students in grades 4-6 to reach their writing potential by helping them through every step of the writing process.
Challenge
Help students discover a love of writing. Encourage the writer in every student with a unique combination of rigor and fun that personalizes the writing process and unleashes creativity. Support teachers with insight into student progress by suggesting relevant intervention and expansion strategies.
Solutions
1. Provide guidance throughout the essay-writing journey
Writing Coach
Writing projects that scaffold and personalize the writing process for students.
TenMarks Writing Coach guides throughout the essay writing process with personalized support from a learning engine that employs natural language processing technology and end-to-end scaffolding for each step of the writing journey. Writing Coach automatically delivers timely and personalized feedback on subjects like essay organization and word choice, helping students analyze and think critically about their writing.
2. Meet students where they are
Bursts
Playful, short writing exercises that engage students and unleash their creativity
During rapid experiments for new feature design, we realized that enabling student choice and autonomy with fun bite-sized writing warmups leads to greater engagement with the platform. To ignite student creativity, we tapped into short writing formats many students are familiar with from mobile apps. In these playful short exercises, students can craft dialogue between characters in a text messaging format or comment on images (like Instagram). With bursts, students experience the fun that comes from writing about topics they care about in formats they know and love.
3. Collect everything you need to teach writing in one place. Period.
Teacher Resources
Lesson plans, graphic organizers, rubrics—everything you need to teach writing all in one place.
Take planning off teachers' plates with a writing curriculum. Everything you need to teach three genres of writing: opinion/argumentative, informational , and response to literature- all in one place. Unit plans, graphic organizers, worksheets and rubrics. Lesson plans for every day, designed to seamlessly align with any English Language Arts instruction. Based on Lucy Calkin's Writing Workshop model with embedded guidance for differentiation to help anticipate and address student challenges, TenMarks Writing's lesson plans help unlock the writing potential in every student.
4. Support focused practice on language and writing skills
Differentiated Assignments
Targeted practice sets to help students build their language and writing skills
Standards-aligned assignments can help struggling students master the tools they need, and enrich students with nuanced understanding of language and writing skills.
Student Outcomes
Student confidence
Polished final essays
“Writing Coach in TenMarks helps my students to be confident about the writing process and to create a successful final piece.”
Teacher Outcomes
Insight into student progress
Save time with personalized suggestions to challenge or encourage students
TenMarks Writing helps teachers easily monitor student progress with reports that provide insight at every step of the writing process.
When it comes time to give feedback, the tool's automatic, personalized suggested comments make it faster and easier to coach students.
Reception
“My students absolutely loved Bursts. When they finished their required work, they wrote entire stories in the text messaging format from Bursts, talking and laughing about how funny their stories were the whole time. They even asked if they could do more writing during recess!”
“Writing Coach in TenMarks helps my students to be confident about the writing process and to create a successful final piece.”
“For the first time all year, my kids are saying that they’re enjoying writing. TenMarks Writing breaks down essays into manageable parts to give kids a visual idea of how to write.”