This month, we’re featuring Mr. Brad Bahns, a fourth grade teacher at Edy Ridge Elementary in Sherwood, Oregon. Mr. Bahns is in his 30th year of teaching and believes student engagement and flexible instruction is the key to success in the classroom.

Mr. Bahns faces an issue familiar to most teachers—his classroom is made up of students with varying skills and abilities when it comes to math. On average, his classroom size is around 30 students each year which makes it difficult to meet each student’s individual needs. However, with Wowzers he’s now able to personalize the curriculum and provide each student with exactly what they need. In this way, Mr. Bahns provides a much wider range of curriculum for his class by assigning more advanced curriculum for his gifted students and introductory lessons and reviews for others.

As Mr. Bahns explains, “I like being able to differentiate instruction for my students–especially for my advanced students. In our district, fifth graders can move to sixth grade math. Wowzers has helped several students accomplish  this and more.”

The students in Mr. Bahns classroom have been in a 1:1 classroom for the past four years. Currently, his students have access to Google Chromebooks. Wowzers is used alongside traditional instruction through textbooks, and he has also allocated 30 minutes of Wowzers curriculum each day to ensure mastery of math concepts. If students are unable to complete their Wowzers assignment in the classroom, the students also access the program at home.

Mr. Bahns also takes advantage of the power behind having real-time reports at his fingertips. Using the information in the reports, he’s easily able to identify students who need immediate 1:1 support, as well as those who need more rigorous curriculum. He regularly prints student activity and progress reports to share with parents during conferences, reinforcing the importance of math and their scores. He also uses the test prep features in Wowzers to prepare students for SBACC. By practicing similar questions ahead of time in Wowzers, students recognize the format and content of the questions in state assessments.

As a tenured teacher, Mr. Bahns recommends incorporating a personalized math program in the classroom. As he explains, “It actually teaches students rather than just doing problems.” Wowzers’ customer support feature is another boon to his teaching method. By using the built-in chat feature, he’s able to quickly and easily get support while still running his classroom. His advice to other teachers using Wowzers is to provide students with notepads or booklets to work out difficult problems on paper, rather than trying to do them on-screen or in their heads.

Perhaps the best supporters of Wowzers are Mr. Bahns’ students. He reports that he often hears, “I have learned a lot from doing Wowzers,” and, “Wowzers is fun!” while they work on the curriculum.