I began teaching in 1997. It is incredible to me how recent that sometimes feels—and yet how much things have changed. Just for perspective, all of our grade books and class rolls were on paper. We reported absences to the attendance office on little slips of paper that an aide came around to collect by hand.
This was before Google, and way before Google became what it is today. Internet searches had to be really specific, or the results would be of little use—or worse, they might be NSFS: Not Safe for School!
MetaMetrics already existed by 1997, but it would be many years before I encountered MetaMetrics and its amazing tools. I left the classroom in 2008 and came to MetaMetrics in 2015. Since I’ve worked here, I’ve gotten to know a little about some of our tools, and can I say, in some ways, I’m a little jealous of people who are still in the profession?
Other people at MetaMetrics can promote our Lexile® and Quantile® Hub and point you right toward the tools that can help make your jobs easier. I’d just like to take a minute to point out some of my favorites.
I started and ended my classroom career as an English/Language Arts teacher. Many, but not all, of my students were what we called reluctant readers. I spent so much time in the library and so much money at our school book fairs trying to find materials that would interest my students. The Lexile® Find a Book tool is amazing! It does not rely on one teacher, one librarian, or one media specialist to be familiar with all the books that might be appealing to each student’s individual preferences and abilities.
Again, recovering ELA teacher here. So the next tool I’ve got to talk about is Lexile® WordLists, part of the Lexile® Framework for Reading’s focus on vocabulary. I find out that instead of choosing the first ten or so words that I was pretty sure my students wouldn’t know, I could have been selecting words based on how important they were to the overall understanding of the text. Selecting vocab based on their word families? OR based on their importance in academic word lists? Really? Amazing!
This last tool(s) is one that’s especially near and dear to my heart because I spent a couple of years working on it: the Lexile® and Quantile® Career Databases. This amazing compilation of information must be one of the most powerful resources in a guidance counselor’s toolbox. I did not work as a guidance counselor, but for several years, I did teach a basic literacy and numeracy class. Our goal was to prepare students for the world of work by giving them remedial instruction in the basics. The information, literally at one’s fingertips, in the Career Databases is incredible and would have been such a boon to me and my students.
In the Career Databases (which are constantly growing to cover more and more jobs), searchers can see both the Lexile and Quantile demands of an array of jobs. Can you imagine how powerful it would be to tell your less-than-motivated students who’ve expressed an interest in, say, fashion design, that they may need to bump their Lexile scores up a bit to do the reading required for such a career? That their Quantile scores are so close to being on target as well. And that they may like to take some classes related to computer applications such as Microsoft Excel and perhaps some Adobe. I always had at least one aspiring pediatrician in my middle school classes. Showing them how important reading and math were to their future success—not just telling them but showing them—how inspiring that must be.
Again, I’ll let our sales department demonstrate for you all of the many amazing, powerful tools at your disposal in the Hub (to say nothing of our Lexile® and Quantile® Educator Academy). These are just a few of my personal favorites. Check them out. And please drop us a line at hello@lexile.com to share your thoughts, questions and experiences!