When students sign up for a trial class with Cosmo, the educational consultant (meaning a member of our sales team) sends them a link to our adaptive assessment. Students are highly encouraged to complete this assessment prior to their trial class, but it's not required, so it's possible that you'll have a trial class without an assessment report to go over.
If this is the case, don't panic! Default materials will automatically upload to your trial classroom 1 hour prior to the start of the trial class. If the student does convert and sign up for classes, you can always request that the learning partner resend the assessment link in the future to gather better data.
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You'll get a message in the app and an email notification letting you know that their assessment has been completed, as well as a link to review the report. We strongly encourage teachers to take a look at the report before the trial class, so you have an idea of what strengths you can highlight and what the student might need to work on.
Trial Class Structure
In general, we recommend spending the first 5 minutes introducing yourself and getting to know the student. There are preloaded "about me" and "about you" slides that can help you do this. Remember that the goal is to make the student comfortable right away and get them excited to learn with you as their teacher.
Then, take about 5 minutes to briefly go over the assessment report. The fourth preloaded slide provides a helpful reminder and transition for this.
You'll need to click "select materials" in the upper left and scroll down to the "from student" section. If the student completed the assessment prior to their trial class, you'll be able to click on the report PDF. The training video on interpreting the assessment report goes into more detail about what the levels mean here, so check that out if you haven't yet.
5 minute Assessment Review
When talking with parents and students, it's important to be honest but also highlight the student's strengths first. In this example, the student is "getting there," meaning they scored around 60% on the 4th grade ELA assessment, and they've met some grade level expectations. You're also trying to convey confidence in your abilities as an ELA teacher to help the student grow.
In this case, you might say, "This report tells me that there are some important 4th grade skills you've already mastered, which is awesome! It also tells me that there are some skills we can work on together to help you grow. Let's take a look at those."
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Moving on to the next slide, you can point out some areas for improvement, sorted by domain. For example, this student needs to work on determining a theme, understanding text structure, making inferences, using context clues, etc. These suggestions come directly from the student's incorrect answers on the assessment.
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Notice that some lessons have a letter in parentheses beside the title. This indicates that the skill repeats in multiple grade levels, based on the Common Core standards. A is the first grade level in which a skill appears, so it's the easiest version. Because this example shows a fourth-grade PLP, that means "making inferences from an informational text" is also a fifth-grade skill, and the fifth-grade version of this lesson would be indicated with the letter B. The sixth grade version would be letter C, and so on. Context clues begins in third grade with version A, and this fourth-grade lesson is version B. You get the idea.
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The third slide contains the personalized learning plan, or PLP. We don't recommend going over this in detail quite yet, but it's important to introduce the idea.
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You may say something like, "Every student at Cosmo receives a personalized learning plan. This is a list of lessons we'll work on during our time together, but know that it's designed to be flexible and customized to your goals! If you want to change what we're working on or bring assignments from school, that's always possible."
35 Minutes Instructional Time
Once you've given an overview of the assessment report, teach the preloaded trial lesson. It should take about 35 min. You can switch to the trial lesson by clicking "select materials" in the upper left once again.
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The preloaded lesson will be under "trial material."
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What we do NOT recommend is going over every question on the assessment during the trial class. This isn't very engaging for the student! And if they answered a question incorrectly, they probably need a lesson on the related skill - not just to review the multiple-choice question again.
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Also, the student can see their assessment report, so they are able to look at their answers along with the correct answers for each multiple-choice question.
5 Minutes Parent Feedback
After the lesson, if the parent has stepped away, ask them to rejoin. Spend the last five minutes doing a recap and review of the PLP. The educational consultant will join at the very end, so this helps provide a smooth transition into their sales pitch.
Follow the same steps as earlier to "select materials" in the upper left, but this time select the "end of class review" file from the "trial materials" section. Use the prompts to give a brief summary of how the lesson went.
Then, notice the last bullet point says "Let's review the student's learning plan..." You may pull up the assessment report again (remember, go to select materials and find it in the "from student" section), and head to page 3 where the PLP begins.
The PLP is crucial to our 1:1 model, so be sure to highlight a few key things in your conversation with the parent and student:
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The initial PLP contains 24 lessons. This is flexible though - if a student needs more time on a skill, you can spend more than one lesson on a PLP topic. And if a student wants to work with Cosmo for more than 24 lessons, the PLP will continually update based on completed topics and the student's performance on their progress checks.
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The PLP has been AI-generated based on the student's assessment results, BUT it can be customized at any time based on student learning goals or teacher observations. Emphasize to parents that you are in control of the PLP with support and insights from Cosmo AI. If they want to go in a different direction, like focusing on narrative writing or just reading informational texts, you can make these adjustments.
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It's also not limited to topics within their grade level. If a student needs some extra practice on a skill from a previous grade level, you can add that in - or you can add topics from higher grade levels to challenge advanced students.
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Every K-8 topic listed on a PLP corresponds to a lesson in our library! Cosmo has a complete curriculum for K-8 ELA, including reading comprehension, phonics, writing, and language/grammar lessons.
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However, customization of the PLP can include "outside" topics as well, like homework help or preparing for an upcoming exam. If the student wants to work on something outside of the Cosmo curriculum, they're welcome to upload it to their Cosmo classroom, and you can add a custom PLP topic for that day's lesson.In general, we want you to focus on what the PLP is and how it can benefit students, rather than just listing off the topics that Cosmo AI has placed on the learning plan.
We already said that you shouldn't go over every question in detail, so you can skip those pages. Head to the very last page of the assessment report, and you should find the student's writing sample. They may type or upload an image. This writing sample can provide some great insights and open up a conversation about how time at Cosmo can help the student improve.
We've also created simple writing rubrics to help guide this discussion further. You can upload these as a class material ahead of time. If so, you can find them by once again clicking "select materials" in the upper left. But if you didn't, don't worry - you can pull them in from the library right from the classroom. Just hit "select materials," then click "library." Make sure you're looking for ELA materials in the correct grade level. The rubrics can be found under the "trial" section. There's one for each genre: narrative, informational/expository, and opinion for K-5 which becomes argumentative in 6-8. Check the appropriate box, then hit "confirm."
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You'll notice that there are two rubrics in the file: one for ideas and composition and one for grammar and conventions. To learn more, check out the training video all about our writing rubrics.
You can use the annotation tools within the classroom, such as using the pen tool to check yes, somewhat, or no - or perhaps you want to use the text tool to add some notes and next steps. You can annotate directly on the student's writing sample as well, perhaps to correct punctuation or highlight an exceptional paragraph. Note that these rubrics are also available for use with long-term students - they're not only for trial lessons, so use them as you see fit.
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A great way to show how seamless a student's Cosmo experience can be is to connect the student's writing sample WITH the rubric WITH the PLP.
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You might say, "I see that your student clearly stated their opinion and gave a few reasons! In 4th grade, we're going to work on expanding this into a 5-paragraph essay with a strong introduction, more facts and details, and a conclusion paragraph. I'll update the student's PLP with these topics so you can see our progress on them."
