For over 30 years, Kathleen Geraghty has dedicated herself to teaching at Hillsborough County School District. This year, her civics class had an impressive 91 percent passing rate in Florida’s 7th grade Civics End-of-Course Assessment. She credits TCI’s Civics Alive! Foundations and Functions program for helping her students have meaningful discussions and learn the skills and content they need to pass the end-of-course assessment.
Kathleen explains, “One of the biggest challenges is finding rigorous material that aligns with our state tests. Florida has never released any questions from the civics end-of-course exam, so we’re often flying blind. TCI’s spiral approach in difficulty—with a mix of easy, medium, and hard questions—has been a huge help. This includes the sample tests and chapter tests.”
Civics Alive! also comes with an End-of-Course Test Prep booklet, which includes an overview of embedded teaching and learning tools, checklists of Florida’s Civics and Government benchmarks, and a full-length practice test.
Kathleen adds, “It has made reviewing for the end-of-course exam much easier. Everything is well laid out, and the lessons are written to standards rather than sequential chapters. I had a 91 percent passing rate this year with a diverse group of students at varying levels. The engagement activities and pre-questions have helped students not feel shocked during exams.”
Monitoring Student Progress Made Easy
Beyond preparing for end-of-course tests, TCI’s online assignment and grading tools make tracking student progress easy throughout the year. With TCI’s grade book, teachers can gain a bird’s-eye view of class trends or drill down to see individual student performance. This functionality helps identify key concepts that students might need additional help with, ensuring continuous progress monitoring.
“A feature that I really like is TCI’s class trends. It allowed me to see how students answered each question. The system is color-coded with every one of the standards, and I can click on it to see how every student performed. For example, if a student had a 60 percent on a particular standard, I can click on that 60 percent to see the exact questions related to that standard and understand what they got wrong. This is a huge help for me to go back and reteach anything necessary. My administration loves it because it’s all there already. They can see it right away, instead of having to pull out other tests and that kind of thing.”
Supporting All Learners
Apart from class trends, Kathleen also leverages reading tools and differentiated activities to support all learners in her classroom. “TCI engages all students in their learning with various activities, not just reading and questions. For example, I have some access point students in my class and the access points handouts have been a huge, huge help to my students and me for differentiating instruction. TCI offers different activities for each lesson, keeping students engaged and making learning diverse.”
TCI’s programs are designed to reach all learners and include many reading tools and differentiating instructions to support teachers. Tools like differentiated reading levels, text-to-speech, main ideas, and highlighting provide extra reading support. Students can build their vocabulary with checks for understanding and vocabulary cards.
Kathleen shares, “Vocabulary improved significantly thanks to Vocabulary Cards. Students became better at understanding visuals and primary source documents, which are crucial for our tests. TCI’s materials save me from having to gather multiple resources.”
Bringing learning alive in the classroom is what TCI is all about. We love hearing from teachers like Kathleen and our goal is to empower them to achieve success in the classroom.
