CENTURY Ambassador Spotlight – Nadine Baki – Dar Al Marefa School

Nadine Baki, a CENTURY Ambassador at Dar Al Marefa School, shares how her school has successfully embedded CENTURY and the benefits it has brought to both teachers and students.

How have you embedded CENTURY in your organisation?

• Started as a class task to ensure students understood how to find their class activities.
• Extended to independent learning from their learning path and as homework.
• Teachers began with diagnostic assessments as a pre-assessment.
• Used the data from diagnostics for differentiation within the class.
• Students write Individual Learning Plans based on diagnostic feedback to set targets for units.

How do teachers use the data on CENTURY?

• To identify areas of strength and weakness for providing extra support.
• To enable an individualised approach to students.
• To reduce workload through instantaneous feedback.
• To inform conversations with students about how they can improve.
• To differentiate teaching based on student weaknesses and strengths.

What initially prompted your organisation to choose CENTURY?

Our school values AI-driven personalised learning to support student progress. All this, we can find it on the CENTURY platform, in addition to the alignment of the IB framework with MYP objectives into CENTURY’s Learning Path, and it helped us also to individualise learning targets for our students.

How did you ensure staff were confident using the platform?

We conducted professional development for teachers. Some representatives from CENTURY came here to our school, and they delivered it for the first time. The second and third time I did it. Sometimes it’s the teacher who has experience with the platform that trains the new joiners in the school. I did general training related to the dashboards, assignments, how to use diagnostics, such as how to assign diagnostic tests for students, how to find the data from the diagnostic and how to differentiate. And then whoever joins later in the year, the lead of each department will do the training.

How have your students accessed CENTURY?

We use CENTURY in classes as formative assessment, at the end of the lesson to check the students’ understanding or the progress throughout the lesson. After a diagnostic, we ask the students to write an Individual Learning Plan on their target for the unit, and what they have to improve according to the feedback provided from CENTURY.

How have students benefitted from CENTURY?

CENTURY provides each individual student with the feedback, what went well, even better if. So, students write in their learning goal for the unit, and they have to make sure they achieve it by practising those skills through CENTURY, and the teacher monitors that process.

What are your expectations for how students use CENTURY?

We ask students to screenshot what they have done on CENTURY with their grades. We set the expectation for them to get 80% and above, and if they don’t get it, they can watch the tutorial video, they can go through the slides, write notes in their notebook to be able to achieve a higher percentage.

What measurable impact has CENTURY had on teacher workload?

It saves time for teachers searching for direct quizzes, to do it during the lesson as a formative assessment, to check progress. It replaced the need to create revision packs after each unit for students to use to prepare themselves for the end of term. We use CENTURY because all the resources are available just with one click. They are ready for students to start practising and be ready for their end of term assessment.

What advice would you give to another school looking to replicate your success with CENTURY?

First thing they have to look at the curriculum to make sure that the objectives align with their curriculum. And then start with the diagnostic for each unit, because this is their starting point. Once the students know their weaknesses and the teacher knows who went wrong, who needs help, who needs to be stretched in this unit, it will help in differentiation. It will help the students to take ownership in dealing with this, to improve their learning and attainment.

Being a CENTURY Ambassador enables teachers to be part of a dynamic community of users, sharing best practice and influencing the direction of the product. If you’d like to become a CENTURY Ambassador, please register your interest by completing this form. To book a demo of CENTURY, click here.