Signs of excellent teaching across the Mountain West
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 Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming 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 Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. 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 across Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Their classrooms are working, and what they believe about teaching explains why. Read together, their answers describe three things worth insisting on before a district decides which platform survives the budget.
It shows a teacher where students are, in time to act
The teachers who use Wayground most intensively share a habit: they locate each student's actual level of understanding before deciding what to do next. A tool worth keeping makes that possible in real time.
Daniel K. from Vallivue School District in Idaho makes the stakes explicit:
“Excellent teaching means knowing where your students are, meeting them at that level, and helping every student make meaningful progress. It requires continuous feedback, the ability to identify misconceptions quickly, and adjusting instruction in real time. Wayground supports this by giving me immediate insight into where students are struggling and where they're excelling.”
In a traditional classroom, a teacher might not discover a widespread misconception until a test comes back days later. Wayground's real-time data surfaces it during the session, while there's still time to address it. A tool that closes that gap is one a district keeps.
David G. from Twin Falls School District in Idaho describes it through opportunity:
“Excellent teaching means creating diverse opportunities for students to achieve mastery through encouragement, guidance, and effective practice. Wayground helped make this possible by reinforcing concepts in a way that felt natural and engaging to students.”
“Felt natural” is the difference between practice that builds understanding and practice that feels like punishment. When reinforcement comes through game-based formats, students experience it as playing, one of the most effective ways to build durable knowledge.
It sparks curiosity, not just compliance
The goal isn't just engagement, it's students who want to figure things out. A keeper cultivates that disposition.
Jenny C. from Hardin High School in Montana leads with operational clarity:
“Excellent teaching means setting clear expectations, engaging all students, and using assessment to guide instruction. Wayground supports that in my classroom by making lessons more interactive, giving me real-time data on student understanding, and helping me quickly identify which students need additional support.”
The word to note is “all.” Real-time data makes the disengaged student visible, so a teacher can pull alongside before that student falls behind.
Carly S. from Riverside Middle School in Billings aims deeper, at genuine curiosity:
“To me, excellent teaching is about giving students learning experiences that make them curious enough to want to figure things out for themselves. I want my students asking questions, testing ideas, making mistakes, and learning from them. Wayground helps create that environment.”
“Making mistakes, and learning from them” is only possible where mistakes are safe, feedback comes fast and without judgment, and the next attempt is always available. A tool that creates that environment is one worth protecting.
It extends the teacher's reach and makes progress visible
Two ideas that are really one: being present for students when they need support, and creating the data that makes progress visible. A keeper does both.
Michelle B. from Evanston High School in Wyoming teaches mathematics:
“Excellent teaching means to be there for your students when they need you. Giving them that one on one attention until they understand the concepts. Wayground is helpful in that it gives them that extra push when teachers are not available.”
“When teachers are not available” is one of the most honest things a teacher can acknowledge. A platform that continues to support students outside direct teacher contact extends the teacher's reach past the walls of the classroom, which multiplies what a single hire can cover, a real consideration in a budget conversation.
Jordon C. from Lander Middle School in Fremont County has built Wayground into his instruction end to end:
“The best teaching is created on the needs of the students. I gather this information in Wayground before any instruction. My students take the pretest and I use the report to drive my instruction. I end the unit with Wayground as well, and students love seeing their progress from beginning to end.”
The pretest-to-posttest arc is as old as instruction itself. What's new is the speed and quality of the data. And students loving to see their progress isn't incidental, visible progress is motivating, and it's a tool worth keeping that makes it visible.
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, pretests, and practice 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 describe teaching as something dynamic: always observing, always adjusting, always creating conditions where students want to learn and can see that they are. 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.
