This blog post is part of the Mastery Connect back to school series, where we highlight the feature enhancements and updates to prepare you to maximize your upcoming school year.
Also check out our Back to School Tips & Tricks:
- Teachers: Tips for a Successful School Year Start
- Assessments and Trackers: Tips for a Successful School Year Start
- Admin: Tips for a Successful School Year Start
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No matter how big your district is, we want delivering assessments at scale in Mastery Connect to be a breeze. Each year, Mastery Connect districts and educators prepare to deliver assessments and gain insights in Mastery Connect. At a district level, this often involves identifying standards, building curriculum maps, distributing guides and resources, creating hundreds or thousands of trackers, and ensuring that all your educators are aligned with minimal errors. Naturally, this requires significant management overhead, and even small errors can add up to a substantial time investment that could have been spent supporting student learning.
We have been working to make these workflows faster and easier for both administrators and teachers, allowing you to invest more time building quality curriculum and assessments, and supporting your students.
Ensure Accurate Alignments with District Approved Standards and Curriculum Maps
Take the guesswork out of tracker creation and ensure every class starts with the right standards.
We’re excited to introduce the ability to create district approved standard sets - an admin-level tool that lets districts designate core standards by subject, ensuring teachers always create their trackers using the correct, most up-to-date standard sets.
Standards often evolve, and in some cases, multiple versions of a state’s standards may still be in use. This can create confusion and extra work for teachers—especially during the busy back-to-school setup period. With district approved standard sets, you can eliminate that confusion. For example, if your district recently transitioned from the 2016 to the 2024 edition of your Language Arts standards, you can now ensure that all new trackers are automatically aligned to the 2024 standards - no manual selection or second-guessing required by teachers.
To set it up:
- Navigate to the Manage Standards page in your admin settings.
- Select the appropriate class or standard set for each subject.
- Ensure the District Approved Standards is Enabled in the Settings tray, and you’re done!
Once configured, teachers will only see the standards you’ve approved- eliminating confusion and ensuring alignment from day one.
Make Curriculum Map Adoption Seamless
Currently, about 60% of trackers are created from Curriculum Maps, which streamline the process of distributing common assessments and ensuring consistency. But first, administrators need to be sure that teachers are using them.
Now, with the aforementioned district approved standard sets, you can go a step further by requiring teachers to also select a designated Curriculum Map when creating trackers for specific subjects or classes.
How it works:
- Make sure your Curriculum Maps are set to District Approved so they appear in your selection menu
- When setting your per-subject cores, simply choose one or more maps to associate with each.
From that point forward, whenever a teacher creates a tracker for the associated class, they’ll be required to select one of the maps you’ve assigned - ensuring consistency in standards, pacing, and assessments across your district.
Once you have done so, your teachers will be able to ensure they are selecting the correct class.
For subjects where you don’t have specific cores you are monitoring, simply leave them empty and your teachers can choose whichever classes apply to them.
With these updates, administrators can kick off the year knowing their teachers have the tools to confidently align to standards, act on insights, and support every student from the very first day of school.
Faster and Easier Tracker Creation
For Mastery Connect customers who do not use Canvas LMS, the start of the school year has historically required teachers to manually create a tracker for each of their classes - a process that can be time-consuming and tedious during an already busy back-to-school season.
To reduce that workload and save teachers time, we’ve introduced a new, streamlined tracker creation workflow that lets teachers bulk-create multiple trackers for their classes at once.
Instead of completing the full setup process for each individual class, teachers can now select any combination of subjects and classes they’re teaching, walk through the setup steps once, and generate all the necessary trackers in a single go.
With district approved cores and assigned curriculum maps guiding the way, teachers will save time and feel confident that they’re set up for success from the beginning of the school year.
Note: This new workflow is currently available for districts using District Approved Standards.
