Signs of excellent teaching across the Heartland
Almost every district is cutting edtech tools this year. Budgets are tighter, and the sprawl has gotten hard to ignore: one widely cited industry report released this year found that districts maintain access to roughly 3,000 digital tools on average, while day-to-day classroom usage clusters around a small handful. The gap between what's purchased and what's used is where a lot of edtech budgets quietly leak, which is why consolidation has climbed toward the top of the priority list for district leaders.
But the number of tools you cut is the easy half of the decision. The harder half is what you're left with. Consolidate down to the wrong platform and you've saved money while quietly making classrooms worse. The goal isn't fewer tools for their own sake. It's keeping the ones that genuinely change what happens between a teacher and a student.
So what does a keeper look like? To answer that, we looked at the most active teachers across the Heartland whose students logged more activity on Wayground than nearly anyone else in their states in May 2026, and asked them a direct question: what does excellent teaching mean to you? Their answers are a practical guide to the signs of excellent teaching, and to what a tool worth keeping really does.
What makes an edtech tool worth keeping?
The clearest test isn't a feature list. It's whether students keep showing up. A tool worth keeping produces sustained engagement you can see in the data, students who keep logging in and doing the work, because the classroom is built for them specifically, not for an average student who doesn't exist.
That's exactly what showed up across Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin. These teachers weren't selected for their philosophies. They were selected because their students logged more activity on Wayground in May 2026 than nearly anyone else in their states. Their classrooms are working, and read together, their answers describe three things worth insisting on before a district decides which platform survives the budget.
It gets students to want to learn
The honest goal of most teaching has less to do with content standards than with getting students to show up mentally and care about what's happening. A tool worth keeping helps cultivate that.
Joe P., a science teacher at Humboldt Community School District in Iowa, puts the goal plainly:
“Getting students to want to learn as well as being excited for each lesson.” You can force compliance and mandate attention, but genuine want has to be cultivated.
Jackson L. from Spirit Lake Community School District in Iowa frames it with clear-eyed humility:
“Excellent teaching means that students are engaged in class, and want to learn. It doesn't mean that they'll fall in love with the subject or content, but as long as they're engaged and showing effort, that's a win.”
That's the bar that separates good teaching from great: the great teachers don't give up on students who don't arrive already loving the subject.
Jay H. from Walton-Verona High School in Kentucky connects engagement to the format it requires:
“Excellent teaching happens when you can find a way to engage your students. This can have many forms but Wayground helps by providing so many ways to have students demonstrate their knowledge from mini quizzes to vocab practice and more.”
Different moments in the learning cycle call for different formats. A platform that offers all of them, and makes switching low-friction, is what lets teachers match the tool to the moment, and it's a strong argument for one platform over several.
Bjorn H. from Schroeder in Grand Forks Public Schools in North Dakota grounds engagement in relevance:
“To me excellent teaching is making learning fun and relevant to all the students in my classroom. As much as I can I like to give real-world scenarios and problems to the kids.”
Fun without relevance is entertainment. Relevant without fun can still feel like a grind. The combination is where real learning tends to take root.
It gives every student a path to success
Every student has a level at which they can succeed, and the teacher's job is to find it and work from there. A keeper makes that possible at scale.
Dr. Barbara W. from Joliet Catholic Academy in Illinois describes the full learning arc:
“Excellent teaching means giving students the tools they need to be introduced to concepts and then participate in remediation learning as they are able to access the work until mastery is achieved.”
“As they are able to access the work” acknowledges that access isn't uniform. Some students access a concept immediately, others need a different format, pace, or entry point.
Susan C. from Lawrence Free State High School in Lawrence Public Schools, Kansas, brings a teacher's appetite for resources:
“Excellent teaching is having a variety of resources at our fingertips and the knowledge of when and where to use them with students. I love that I have so many educational enrichment activities that Wayground provides.”
Knowledge of when and where is the professional judgment that separates a teacher from a content delivery system. A platform with enough range to support that judgment produces instruction that feels tailored rather than generic.
Robyn D. from St. Gabriel the Archangel School in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri, focuses on the moment of success:
“Excellent teaching is helping to provide students with ways that they can be successful. Wayground supports my classroom by continuously giving my students a way to show their knowledge in a fun and exciting way.”
Success, especially for students who haven't experienced much of it, is a condition teachers engineer. Minnie from Westside Middle School in Westside Community Schools, Nebraska, says it most directly: “Excellent teaching means that every student can learn and be at their level of success.” Not some students. Every student.
Brandon A. from East Allen County in Indiana adds a practical note many Heartland teachers will recognize:
“Wayground makes things easy for reviews and fun games you can create. Though the majority of what we do is on paper it is nice when students use these pieces of technology as a change of pace in the classroom.”
A change of pace matters. The best learning environments don't require everything to be digital, and a tool worth keeping earns its place alongside the rest of what a classroom does.
It makes repetition stick instead of bore
There's a version of repetition that produces boredom and a version that produces mastery. The difference is in how the practice is delivered, and a keeper delivers the kind that sticks.
Brian N., a social studies teacher at Gentry Academy Independent Charter District in Minnesota, grounds his teaching in research:
“Excellent teaching includes scientific-backed methods such as using repetition and practice for memorization and long-term storage.”
The question isn't whether to use repetition, but how to deliver it in a way students engage with rather than resist. Game-based formats that make retrieval feel competitive and low-stakes are one effective answer.
Jessica B. from Glenwood Intermediate School in Plain Local Schools, Ohio, teaches choir, using Wayground for music theory:
“Excellent teaching means being creative about teaching tools, even in arts classes. In choir, we have to spend a lot of time rehearsing for performances. In our rehearsals we discuss concept, terms, and theory. Wayground makes the vocab, theory, and concept review more engaging and fun for everyone.”
A choir student who can't recall what a ritardando means is in the same position as a history student who can't recall the causes of World War I. A platform that makes retrieval practice work across every subject is one worth keeping over several single-purpose tools.
Denise G. from Gateway Technical College in Wisconsin, who works in higher education, brings the thread full circle: “Wayground has made it easy for our instructors to make learning a bit more fun. That's what teaching is all about, having students understand the materials we present.” Understanding is the goal. Everything else is in service of that.
It covers enough ground to replace several narrower tools
The signs above are about quality. This one is about breadth, and it's where consolidation and impact meet. A platform can do one thing brilliantly and still leave a district paying for four others to fill the gaps. The tools most worth keeping are the ones that do more than one job well.
The same Wayground account that runs the assessments and review these teachers rely on also covers lessons and presentations, reading passages, interactive video, and flashcard-style review. A district doesn't have to buy those capabilities as five separate subscriptions from five separate vendors. Whether any one teacher uses all five today or grows into them over time, the point for a budget owner is that the coverage is already there, under one contract, ready when a classroom needs it.
Set that against a stack of narrower tools a district is renewing one by one, and the arithmetic gets simple. Consolidating toward a platform that meets the other tests, real reach and real-time feedback, and also covers the ground of several separate tools, is how a district cuts cost without cutting into what teachers and students depend on.
Bringing the budget and the classroom into one conversation
The three signs above ran through answers from teachers across eleven states and every kind of school setting: every student can learn, every student deserves access, and every student deserves the format and pacing that lets them succeed. None of that shows up in engagement numbers by accident.
That's what makes this more than a budget exercise. When the platform a district keeps is also the one driving the engagement its best teachers are already producing, the cost conversation and the teaching-quality conversation stop being two separate meetings. Knowing which of your own teachers are doing this work, and making sure the tools they rely on survive the next round of cuts, protects both the budget and the classroom at once.
Want to see which tools and teachers in your district are already driving that kind of impact? We can pull a report showing your most active Wayground educators and how they're using the platform, so you can find the same signs of excellent teaching in your own schools before you decide what to keep. Reach out to get started.
Teachers featured here were among the top 50 most active Wayground users in their respective states based on student activity in May 2026. All responses shared with permission.
