As new brain research permeates educational insights, we are becoming increasingly aware that engagement and affectivity – long key components of many pedagogical constructs – are now being proven to have direct links to maximizing understanding and retention. In short, affective education continues to be the most effective education.
This underscores Theodore R. Sizer’s work (late founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools)
Sizer emphasized that, for students to succeed, they must be personally known at school and have strong relationships with the people there. But Sizer is not the only one who’s talked about the importance of quality learning relationships. In fact, learning theorists and pedagogists from Piaget to Vygotsky, Myers-Briggs to Lawrence, Dewey to Comer, Sousa, Willis, and Cushman.
We think of Kidzmet as Learning Guided by Passions and Strengths.
Like the indispensible GPS system on your smart phone or in your car, Kidzmet guides teachers toward methods and approaches that are based on who their students uniquely are… You won’t find one-size-fits-all guidelines or recommendations to help your students fit a specific mold.
As is well documented by research, a teacher’s EQ has a significant impact on his ability to positively impact two critical dimensions of educating children: (1) whetting students’ appetites for learning and (2) learning how to effectively work together in teams.
Administering Kidzmet at the beginning of the school year can help the teachers in your school or district create richer, stronger relationships more quickly with students because they have a greater insight into who each student is and what interests him most. Kidzmet student and teacher profiles can also help your school or district with more insightful class planning for the upcoming school year.
What makes Kidzmet different?
Our proprietary 90 question assessment and algorithm looks not only at Jungian personality type (the basis of Myers-Briggs), but multiple intelligences and cognitive style preferences, as well, to give teachers a well-rounded view of who each student is so that they can meet them where they are as human beings.
While our assessment may be longer than other personality quizzes you’ll find online, our goal is to be as thorough as possible, so that we can give you as accurate a “portrait” as possible. With more than 50,000 completed profiles under our belts, we’ve aligned our algorithm to stay true to the MBTI’s official estimated frequencies of type, so that you can feel confident that the results are as accurate as the answers your students provide.
With this said, it’s crucial that all students know before you administer the profile that there are no right or wrong answers to any of the questions in order to get an accurate result.
Once you upload your student names, numbers, and teacher assignments to your private Kidzmet FTP link, your students can head to the computer lab to complete the profile simultaneously, complete the profiles on tablets or laptops in class, or send them home with a private login link to complete as homework. Each teacher will find their students’ results in their dashboard as soon as each student completes their profile.
Kidzmet’s campus platform is set up so that teachers can “share” student profiles with other teachers at their school or with other schools in the district. Some use cases could be a special needs teacher, learning specialists, school psychologist, or teachers in various periods.
In Kidzmet’s campus platform, students can also be divided into periods, so that teachers can get a sense of which types of lesson plans would best engage each class as a whole.
Student profiles can easily be moved into different classrooms. Just export the data from your Student Information system into a CSV flat file and up to the FTP site. Students will move, be added, or deleted the very next morning. (We batch the updates overnight in order to minimize impact to our user community.)
Your student information and even your Kidzmet dashboard are all siloed behind a private, password protected subdomain.
Awards and Accolades
Over the years, Kidzmet has been graced with myriad awards and accolades, including:
Your Kidzmet campus platform is just $15/teacher per year and comes with:
- Private, siloed subdomain
- Administration dashboards that show teacher and student profile completion status by district, school, grade level, and individual class
- Personality type graphs that can be drilled down to district, school, grade level, and individual class levels
- Multiple intelligence graphs that can be drilled down to district, school, grade level, and individual class levels
- Cognitive style preference graphs that can be drilled down to district, school, grade level, and individual class levels
- Enthusiasm level graphs that can be drilled down to district, school, grade level, and individual class levels
- Student profiles can be shared amongst teachers and administrators and broken down into period assignments
- Student profiles can be moved from teacher to teacher as they change grades or periods
- For an additional fee, our Simpler Systems partner can provide Kidzmet integration with your Student Information System so that you can gain deeper level insights into whatever you can dream up—letter grade overlays, absence rate overlays, curriculum choice overlays, which teachers work best with which student profiles—the list is virtually endless!
- Kidzmet campus platform subscribers are the first to gain access to new dimension roll outs or beta tests like language translations, more granular tips, and more.