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“TCI works well with a lot of different teaching styles. There are some people who just really don’t want the kids on Chromebooks at all, so then you can use the textbook. There are enough activities to fill your whole year without using the online components, but if you also want to add that in, that does supplement it really well.”Megan Forbes
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Megan Forbes is a veteran history teacher at Arcadia Unified, heading into her 15th year in the classroom and her tenth at the district. Over the course of her teaching career, she has taught history, covering nearly every content area that middle school offers. This year marks a first for her: teaching only 6th-grade history.
“I’ve never had that before, where I just teach one subject or one grade level,” she said, “so that’s kind of exciting to just focus on one content area and one grade level.”
That focus came with its own learning curve. Megan had spent several years teaching 8th-grade U.S. history, where she was used to rounding out the textbook with her own supplemental finds. But 6th-grade history didn’t work the same way. “When you teach U.S. history, even if your textbook is not great, you can find so much online. Everything is in English, and everything is accessible,” she said. Ancient history called for a different approach, since primary sources for that era aren’t always classroom-ready. “A lot of primary sources, like Hammurabi’s Code, are not very readable. You need a lot of help to get through those and understand them,” she explained.
That’s exactly where TCI’s curriculum does the heavy lifting for her. The readings and primary sources are already selected and leveled for 6th graders, so she isn’t spending her own planning time tracking down age-appropriate materials or reworking dense texts herself.
“The writers of these textbooks have done this research, they’ve put it at a level that 6th graders can understand. And so, I think for this grade level and this content, it’s more important to have a really strong textbook and have something that students can latch onto before we try to add in outside things. You have to have a base understanding first, and for 6th grade, that was something I had to learn. You really need a strong textbook for this content.”
For a subject where reliable, ready-to-teach sources are hard to come by, that groundwork gives her more time to focus on the inquiry-based, hands-on parts of the lesson. That same combination: flexibility, reliable content, and engagement, is what stood out during the adoption process itself.
Megan was part of the adoption committee that reviewed roughly five different curriculum publishers before Arcadia Unified landed on TCI. What set TCI apart wasn’t just having a textbook; it was what came with it. Other programs simply moved the print textbook online. “Some things were just like, okay, well, it has the textbook online,” Megan said, “but that just wasn’t all that exciting.”
TCI’s built-in differentiation and flexibility, on the other hand, stood out right away. “It’s nice to have different levels of reading,” she said. “Sometimes we have students who want to change the level, or translate it into a different language, so it is nice to have those options.”
The Video Activities sealed the deal: “It’s more interactive, and they’re moving through things, and they see the videos, and there are maps. They can sometimes go to the place that we’re studying within the video.” On top of that, she liked having built-in review tools ready to go: “They also like the little quizzes and the review games. There are review games and vocab games, and so we do those as well.”
That flexibility wasn’t just about choosing a curriculum. It shaped how Megan uses it every day, especially when it comes to screen time.
Screen time, which is a growing concern for districts everywhere, and Arcadia Unified is no exception. “We’re all kind of starting to feel that students are on the Chromebooks too much,” Megan said. “If I’m gonna have them on the Chromebooks or on screens, I want them to do something different than what the textbook could do.”
Active learning is TCI’s answer to exactly that concern. Rather than simply moving a textbook onto a screen, TCI builds its programs around activities where students ask questions, think critically, and engage hands-on in the classroom or online. By encouraging students to participate actively in their own learning, TCI creates experiences that are both meaningful and memorable, and gives teachers the flexibility to teach the way they want. By putting active learning at the center of instruction, TCI helps students not just absorb content but connect concepts, think critically, and take pride in their work.
Megan puts that flexibility into practice every day. Rather than treating the textbook and the online component as competing options, she moves between them depending on what the day calls for. “If we’re just reading, then we’ll read the textbook, and I like having them use the interactive notebook for taking notes, but then I also like the Video Activities,” she said. “There are some days that we are just not on the Chromebooks, and then other days, we’re using the Video Activities. So I like to have the two options.”
The program’s structure also reinforces skills her school is already teaching schoolwide. “There’s an essential question at the beginning of every chapter, and that also works well with another thing that we’re doing at our school — we have thinking maps,” Megan explained. “There’s already a question presented — I don’t have to think of a question for each chapter. It meshes well with the other skills that we’re trying to teach them, as far as note-taking and critical thinking.”
Since adopting TCI, Megan has spent far less time building materials from scratch. “I really like that I have a lot of options for things that I can pull from. I don’t have to create everything myself,” she said — a shift from her early years of teaching when she was making her own quizzes from the ground up. Now she can pull from the existing quizzes and then reassign them. “I can see the data, I can see who is understanding and who isn’t, and who needs to go back and re-read.” That visibility gives her a much clearer, faster read on where each student stands than she had before.
She has also seen a real shift in engagement. “They like doing the Video Activities. They’re interested in those things,” she said. For her 6th graders in particular, the goal is to spark curiosity that carries forward: “What we’re doing with 6th grade social studies is just trying to plant that seed of just kind of giving them an overview of ancient history and hoping that they take an interest in something and kind of learn these basic social studies skills.” By that measure, TCI is delivering: “They are interested, they are engaged, so that’s what I’m shooting for.”
Megan’s biggest recommendation for districts considering a curriculum change is that TCI adapts well to different teaching styles. “I think that it works well with a lot of different teaching styles,” she said. “There are some people who just really don’t want the kids on Chromebooks at all, so then you can use the textbook. There are all those interactive activities that aren’t online that come with it. There are enough activities to fill your whole year without using the online components, but if you also want to add that in, that does supplement it really well.”
That same flexibility shows up among her own colleagues. “The history teachers at our school all teach pretty differently. We’re not forced to stay on the same track or anything like that, but it works well for all of us and all of our different teaching styles.”
For Megan, that balance between print and digital, structure and flexibility, is exactly what she and her fellow teachers at Arcadia Unified needed, and it’s what keeps her students engaged.
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In this lesson, students act as historians to learn about the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi. They evaluate him by debating the effectiveness of his efforts to unify ancient China.
“We really like the Ancient China section, and Qin Shi Huang — learning about this emperor who is so extreme, students always really like that chapter and learning about him.”
Students read about the impact of geography on this period of history, then use the maps and their reading to answer the Geography Challenge questions in their interactive notebook.
“I always get excited about a new chapter or a new unit, because we get to start with the map, and we spend maybe more time than most people do on those, because I really want them to color it in completely, label it completely, answer all those questions, and really work with the maps,” she said. “I think that’s a skill that can sometimes get overlooked, but I really want them to have those map skills and geography skills.”