Blog
Time to complete:
0:03:07
Simplifying EL program management: See what’s new in Ellevation Forms
Blog
Time to complete:
0:03:07
Simplifying EL program management: See what’s new in Ellevation Forms
Simplifying EL program management
Meeting the diverse needs of English learners (ELs) is a top priority in schools all across the country. But navigating complex EL program management can leave educators in need of more time and resources without the right supports in place.
Improving efficiency around meeting compliance, progress monitoring, and reclassification has always been at the forefront of Ellevation’s focus. Over 1,700 districts have leveraged our dashboards, student lists, parent letters, and more to collect and collaborate around EL student data. At the same time, our own teams have been learning from district feedback to discover what aspects of EL program management continue to cause friction and strain resources.
As the education landscape has evolved, we’ve recognized the value of saving educators time and effort while ensuring accurate student information to shape instruction is at their fingertips.
That's why we've been working hard on Forms: our most flexible, convenient and actionable set of features to date to meet compliance, monitoring and reclassification responsibilities all with one tool.
What’s new in Forms?
Many educators have started to use Forms to manage key processes that they are familiar with every day -- unifying these processes under one tool within Ellevation Platform. But since Summer of 2024, we’ve launched powerful new features to support richer data collection and analysis as well as empower educators to be more confident in their EL support.
We’ve focused our efforts on improving three key areas:
- Stronger EL program support: Enhanced capabilities to offer more robust support for program workflows
- More flexibility: New features to increase content configurability to adapt forms to meet any requirement
- Time-saving upgrades: Saving educators time and effort with an easier user experience and increased efficiency around workflow completion
For long-time Platform users, these updates may bring excitement - you might see features or functionalities that you’ve been asking for! They may also bring apprehension, as with learning any new process or system. But our team has been listening and learning from districts for years to develop a tool that is well worth the transition – and now is the time to make the switch.
Read on to discover how Forms can improve user experience for educators and impact student outcomes across your district.
Meet more use-cases for key student decisions with enhanced capabilities
Throughout EL support processes, access to comprehensive student information is critical to informing instructional decisions and ensuring that all stakeholders have a holistic understanding of each EL. Educators can now use Forms to easily discover what decisions have been made for students, why educators made them, and where students are in their progress toward English proficiency - all in one centralized place.
Enhancing most-used features with teacher input and comments
Our Student List and Dashboards have become a cornerstone for informing data-driven EL program decisions. Now, this information is even more meaningful with teacher input and comments from Forms captured in the Student List. Sharing insights and observations through a feature that is already highly utilized ensures that educators have critical context about student decisions made in Forms - ultimately creating a system where more informed actions can take place.
Better ways to view and analyze designated supports
Ensuring decisions around designated supports (like testing accommodations) are clearly documented is a crucial step in the compliance process, especially for partners in Texas that conduct LPACs. We’ve upgraded how these supports are documented in Forms to enable more efficient workflow completion. Users can now configure designated supports shown by test year, providing a clearer view of just the information that is relevant to their needs. Additionally, we’ve added a side-by-side view of the teacher recommendations and comments next to the finalized designated supports, to provide a fuller picture of what decisions have been made for students and why.
Tracking progress and goals
Our proficiency level Descriptors and Goals features have been a powerful tool for partners to demonstrate the progress their students are making towards their language development objectives. Now, Forms mirrors the Student Profile to spotlight both current and progressive Descriptors for students across each domain based on their ELP test results. Having this information at teachers’ fingertips lightens the work of planning data-driven, targeted instruction - particularly beneficial for educators who may be new to or still learning best practices of EL instruction. Forms now also offers features that allow users to meet new workflow requirements around goal progress tracking within the tool.
These features just scratch the surface of all the updates we've made: next we’ll highlight how features in Forms are enhancing content configurability and increasing efficiency around workflow completion.