Curro is the leading independent school network in South Africa. They provide a progressive, technologically advanced and innovative education for young people across the country, with schools in all nine provinces. In this case study, teachers at Curro Serengeti High School Netshedzo Mavhungu and Hayley Morris share how they have been using CENTURY to support their learners.
Netshedzo Mavhungu, Educator, Curro Serengeti High School
Using CENTURY to inform teaching
The data on CENTURY informs me of my students’ areas for improvement, which allows me to focus on those. By the end of an activity, I know where my learners are at, how much of the content I just taught they understood, what their misconceptions are and what kind of questions they can and can’t deal with and so on. If there’s a problem, I can tell whether it’s a skill issue, a concept issue or exactly which chapter it is. So, every time I start to teach in the morning, I am well informed on exactly what to target – there are no guessing games.
Saving teacher time
As a teacher, CENTURY saves you a lot of admin and content creation time. The marking is taken care of, and the students get feedback immediately. It’s like you’re giving feedback for each and every single student in one go, which you obviously couldn’t do as a human. Imagine marking every single book in less than one minute – CENTURY does that for you, and it gives you all of the data.
Helping pupils progress
For two terms, I have had a child who just wasn’t making progress and I didn’t know why. I got them to do extra homework and stay on after lessons, but it wasn’t making a difference – they really wanted to improve, and they were getting tired of putting effort in and not being able to move up.
When CENTURY came, those learners who had been really struggling to make progress started to improve consistently for the first time. In fact, their engagement with the platform was even higher than that of the other students.
It’s the first time I’ve seen children this motivated because they can see the correlation between what they’re doing on CENTURY and how it’s improving their results – not just in terms of their results on CENTURY, but when it comes to exams and formal assessments. One student actually improved their grade by 10%, and another by over 18% since using CENTURY, and they couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t even believe it myself. I was marking their paper, and I thought “Is this real? Have I miscounted the marks?”.
I also took a class that was performing the worst in their year and got them onto the platform, while keeping the other classes the same so that I could compare. I thought that if CENTURY works for that class, it really works. I could see that the children weren’t lazy because of the amount of hours they put in – they just didn’t know what to target. Once they started using CENTURY, they actually overtook two other classes in terms of their average score. This was the first time they had an average above any other class, you should have seen their jubilation!
It showed me that this tool really works because I had previously tried almost everything to help students who were struggling – some parents had even hired tutors for their children – but nothing had worked. With CENTURY, we knew exactly what to target and how to help. So, I can’t see myself without it at the moment, I’ve been so spoilt by it.