Setting students on a path to top grades in GCSE geography with Tassomai

We recently spoke to Charlotte Pollard, a Geography ECT (Early Career Teacher) at Treviglas Academy in Newquay, about how Tassomai helps with teaching a subject like geography and how her school creates a bit of friendly competition to encourage learning and revision on the platform…

Our school started using Tassomai last year but I only joined in September, so I've been using it since then and the impact has been really positive. I can already see the kids picking up knowledge by using it. As an ECT in my first year I’m still getting to know the content myself, so I know that if there are any gaps or I miss something then it gets picked up and covered by Tassomai, which is great to take some of that extra pressure off. 

Covering the landscape

With teaching geography, we pretest students quite a lot prior to actually teaching so that when they come into lessons and I'm starting to cover things, they’ll say “Wait! I remember this from Tassomai”. So it gives them a bit of thinking time and then they're able to bring that information into class and we build a bigger picture between us. It’s not just all me talking and they feel that connection from doing Tassomai.

All mapped out 

The content on Tassomai aligns perfectly with our syllabus which also helps with homework as we have homework booklets which match the topics we're teaching in class. So they've got it coming from all angles and it all marries up really nicely and I’ve had a lot of students say how helpful that is.

Measured data

We measure the success of Tassomai by Daily Goals completed, but we also like to look at how long students spend on Tassomai alongside their accuracy. Using this, I then know which students I need to target. For instance, if a student has 50% accuracy and is spending hours and hours on Tassomai then I know that in class I need to go over and help them. Whereas, the child that's not spending as much time and has 90% accuracy might not need as much one-on-one time in that particular area. So I use the data in quite a lot of different ways and it’s really helpful to have the different metrics.

There are so many great features on the Teacher Dashboard, like the progress bar, but simply being able to see how many questions they’ve actually got right is something I look at a lot. 

The calendar is really useful too as I can go back to a certain term or date range and see exactly what a student has done. Then, when I go into parents' evening, there’s actual evidence of where work is being done or not, and the improvement that doing Tassomai has had on their grades.

Aside from homework, Tassomai works well as an aide to teachers. We had a child join the class just after Christmas and I couldn’t just stop what I was teaching the entire class to allow them to catch up. So I ensured they kept on top of doing their Tassomai daily, so they built that knowledge base, and it's played the role of a weekly catch up lesson and now they’re up to speed.

An evolving environment

The constant improvements on what Tassomai does has been incredible. Mai, the AI-tutor, and the newer Mai Explains version of it, are just brilliant as it is basically doing my job when the students are at home. They've got an instant reasoning to why an answer is wrong, rather than just going onto the next question.

Competitive climate

Our students really enjoy Tassomai as we turn it into a competition across the Humanities department. Every week we figure out who's the top class overall, so they’re doing it for themselves but also for each other, they like that competitive side of it where there’s also teamwork involved. It makes it fun and they enjoy it more. It’s actually quite an advanced technique because if you look at football teams or sports squads, for instance, it really does work where there's accountability.

Building the levee

Tassomai is great at reinforcing knowledge.  With geography, where we simply don’t have the time to go back over a two year course and it fills those gaps, Tassomai reinforces knowledge and revises it for the students as well. Plus, it's a bit of a fun way to do it and I love it – I just absolutely love Tassomai and what it does!

Tassomai in three words

If I were to describe Tassomai in three words they would be…

Enjoyable - for myself and for the students.

Beneficial - I’ve really seen the impact it really has.

Light Bulb Moment - a phrase but, you can almost see the moment they just get it.

Find out more about using Tassomai for geography or Tassomai for history.