CENTURY Ambassador Spotlight – Matthew Tansley

Matthew Tansley, a CENTURY Ambassador and Head of Secondary at the International British School of Bucharest, tells us about how they have successfully embedded CENTURY. He also shares some pearls of wisdom about what the school would have done differently if they were embedding CENTURY from scratch. 

How have you embedded CENTURY in your organisation?

• Use diagnostics to assess where the children are at the start of the sequence of learning
• Nuggets built into plenary time at the end of a sequence of learning or as homework tasks 
• Encourage the children to go beyond what is assigned by their teacher to learn a little bit more about a particular activity 

How do teachers use the data on CENTURY?

• To identify areas of strength and areas of weakness so they know where to provide extra support
• To enable an individualised approach to students
• To reduce their workload 
• To inform conversations with students about how they can improve

What first appealed to you about CENTURY?

The thing that really excited me was the fact that it could enable students to individualise their learning and the approach to using the artificial intelligence to push children in a particular direction based upon their prior knowledge. This is something that all teachers are looking to do, but it’s the workload and the time and the effort necessary that is quite significant. 

How has CENTURY helped to structure online learning?

We try to strike that balance between traditional ways of learning as well as having the students online. CENTURY allows us to achieve that as it’s made time online more focused. The platform allows students to really drill down into the areas of the curriculum which are important in order to help them learn and to move on. We’re also aware of what we celebrate as success, so it’s not about the number of hours they spend on the platform, but it’s about the scores that they’re achieving on those particular nuggets. 

Watch the full video here:

Has CENTURY had an impact on independent learning?

As a high performance learning school, we’re trying to encourage our children to be independent and to have high expectations of themselves and CENTURY has enabled us to do that. Traditionally, some of the students have only used edtech platforms just before an assessment. What we’ve tried to do is encourage them to do little and often. So what they’re doing is continually revising and going over things as they go through the year. The platform  also allows us to share the expectation that students should be responsible for going back over their learning. 

What advice would you give to other schools or educators looking to replicate your success with CENTURY? 

What I would suggest is to get parents on board. That’s something that we didn’t do straight away. What we had to do is to convince them that this is just one prong of the trident that we’re using when we’re educating your child. The teacher is, of course, going to be teaching them traditionally as well and enabling them to develop the skills that they need in order to become high performance learners, for example. But  CENTURY is giving that diagnostic feedback on how the child is doing, and then that enables us to be a bit more clever about how we work with your children. I think it would be a lot easier now to get parents on board because the world is changing. Everybody sees what AI is doing and how it can be used in education. I think that parents are a little bit more savvy now about adaptive AI and what it can do in order to help their children become better learners. 

Any final words about CENTURY?

We’re really pleased with how CENTURY has helped our learners. Our examination results are improving year on year. We are probably in the top 5% worldwide for what we do – our graduate destination record is fantastic. But CENTURY is that tool which is helping along in the journey. Without CENTURY our teaching would not be as individualised as it is. The platform is really helping some of those children be able to stretch themselves and get those top grades. So CENTURY has really made the difference. 

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.