Where, when and how to use Tassomai in the classroom

Schools have found success using Tassomai in a variety of ways, and we’ve collected some of them here to give you some ideas - this list is in no way exhaustive, so if you have any suggestions please let us know!

Setting Tassomai as homework

This is the most obvious, yet also perhaps most effective way to use Tassomai - setting it as homework. However there are different ways to do this, often depending on how flexible the school is in terms of homework.

Some schools simply tell their students to keep their wheel green and blue, which is what we would recommend. However, if doing this, teachers need to check how their students are doing regularly - and not always at the same time. If students figure out that their teacher will only check on Monday morning, then they’ll often end up only doing Tassomai on Sunday evening, which means they don’t benefit from any spacing - a key tenet of Tassomai.

However, we appreciate that schools don’t always have that flexibility with homework - you may have to set 40 minutes each week, for example. In this case, it is perhaps best to set a progress target of 5% each week, while still encouraging students to spread this work throughout the week.

We’re also going to add in some more data on students next year, including “time spent on Tassomai”, which should help with this - watch this space!

Lessons and directed improvement

One of the biggest benefits of Tassomai for teachers is the information it gives you on your students - make sure you take advantage of this! Before a lesson, have a look at the understanding grid and check to see if there are any orange or red dots in the class average (the row on the top). If this is the case it means your whole class is struggling with this topic, and it might be worth spending part of the lesson recapping that topic.

For this class, you might want to recap “Power”, which is 4.1.1.4 in the AQA Specification

You can also drill down deeper into this information. Set the whole class a task, such as a worksheet (or working on Tassomai!) and while they’re doing this see if there are any topics where a few students are struggling and use this information to target intervention.

Here it is clear that both Andrews, Sally, Anna, Spencer and Neil could do with some help in topic 1.2, “Changes of State” [Full topic names can be seen using the hover over function]