Susan Atherton, Seventh Grade Language Arts
Memorial School
7 Grant Ave.
Eatontown, NJ 07724
(732) 542-5013
August 2001
TIENET® Changes Teaching
TIENET®, a catchy name, but is it really going to change anything? Working in education for 34 years, I can truly say that I have heard all kinds of promises about how a new book, program, etc. are going to revolutionize my classroom. So I approached it with much skepticism.
The idea of tracking students by actually being able to use the results of standardized test score results was new. However, the TIENET® program gave our district a way to get a graphical presentation of those results correlated to our district curriculum guide, which reflected our state standards. At a glance, the teacher can see where the strengths and weaknesses lie relative to the curriculum that will be presented by the teacher during the school year. The graphical reports also give the teacher an immediate overview of the entire class's performance thus eliminating the need to waste time teaching what was already mastered.
After a year of developing the content for our curriculum guide through a series of inservice events, and taking small steps at implementation, my colleagues and I were ready for a district-wide implementation of the program. On August 30, 2001 a presentation of the program, using the results from the preceding spring's testing effort, was made to a large sampling of the district's teachers. Teachers were enthusiastic about being able to see where their class stood relative to their grade level curriculum BEFORE school even began. They enjoyed the ease of use of the program in delivering information that made it easier to find resources appropriate to demonstrated needs and generate reports that helped them make better instructional decisions. We have used TIENET® to complete two benchmark assessments that have been formulated by the district's curriculum committee. These results help us to focus our resources where they need to be so that we all can be proud of the results reported in the newspaper. Using the program to help us correlate the various components of instruction and assessment demands has helped us better understand the tests used by the community as a measure of our effectiveness. The reports teachers can generate from TIENET® have been sent home with report cards to help us better communicate with parents. TIENET® capabilities are slowly being introduced to district teachers and we are looking forward to continuing the upward spiraling of our scores that we saw last year. My experience with TIENET® has truly changed my teaching format.
