To the Teachers Who Shape Our Work: We're Listening

Your feedback matters.

At Curriculum Associates, we want to understand where you spend your time, where your struggles are, and where our tools could potentially give you time back. Because we touch so many classrooms—more than 550,000 each year—we have a real chance to help make a difference in how students learn.

We've always believed in listening carefully, building thoughtfully, and staying close enough to educators to really hear you. It’s the heart of our product development model and the primary driver in our ability to serve millions of students and teachers across classrooms.

Here are two examples of what that looks like.

Listening in Action 

In August, we gave school and district admins the same control over i-Ready Personalized Instruction schedules that they'd long had over our assessment schedules. A “Schedule Restrictions” setting lets admins define exactly which days and times Personalized Instruction is available to students. Outside that window, students don't see lessons on their dashboard at all. And admins no longer have to intervene after the fact if overuse is an issue; they can set the boundary in advance.

In September, we released a flag in the Personalized Instruction Summary District/School Report view. The “Exceeds Recommended Time-on-Task” sends an alert when a student goes over the limit in a single week, so overuse patterns show up early instead of hiding inside an average. This feature doesn’t tell you what to do about a student who trips the flag. But it ensures the signal reaches you directly instead of getting buried in a district average that looks fine while individual kids are being missed.

 

How Educator Feedback Inspires New Ideas 

 

These product enhancements and others happen because we hear through different channels—support calls, surveys, direct feedback, focus groups, advisory board conversations, professional learning sessions, and routine check-ins—that they matter.

When user feedback comes in, I see it as a learning expedition. We ask questions to get to the root of the problem. We try to put ourselves in your shoes. It means user interviews, research, and conversations, until the pattern becomes unmistakable. From there we build a prototype and go back to ask if we got it right. Did it make the impact we were hoping for? In a real sense, educators are driving these changes alongside us.

Feedback not only helps us fix something that’s not working as well as it could, sometimes it leads to an entirely new idea, like Magnetic Literacy, our new core literacy product or the shortened i-Ready Inform assessment. In that case, data showed that students were spending more time on the assessment than teachers wanted. We did the research to understand how to preserve the fidelity of the results in a shorter window, ran focus groups, tested extensively, and now we’re seeing the reduction we hoped for—up to 38% less time testing for some grades. The best part is that you don’t have to sacrifice the quality of the insights you’ve grown to depend on.

 

Teachers Are the Center of Everything We Build 

 

At Curriculum Associates, we don't build anything educators haven't helped shape in some way. We always try to understand your needs, what will help you in your classroom, and the environment you’re in to support your goals. That's something we're genuinely proud of, and it isn't optional for a company built on the belief that classrooms only get better when the people in them are heard, not just served.

That belief goes back to our founding. Since 1969, our reason for existence hasn't changed: every student deserves the opportunity to learn and grow and get to grade level and beyond, and every educator deserves the tools to make that possible. If a report still doesn't tell you what you need, or a flag still doesn't match what you're seeing in your own classroom, tell us—through your Partner Success team, tech support, the feedback button at the bottom of your i-Ready screen, or one of our advisory boards. We want to hear from you.

Keep telling us what's working, what isn't, and what you wish you had. We're excited to deliver new enhancements that are in progress, and we'll keep building for what you need. Thank you for being such a critical part of everything we do.

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More Resources for You:

Learning from Educators: Trust, Feedback, and Building Better Products

Screen Time in Schools: It's Right to Ask Questions

Purposeful Screen Time in Schools: A Framework for District Leaders