Signs of excellent teaching in Maine's classrooms
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 top 50 most active teachers in Maine whose students logged more activity on Wayground than nearly anyone else in the state 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 in Maine. 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 Maine. Their classrooms are working, and what they believe about teaching explains why. Read together, their answers describe two things worth insisting on before a district decides which platform survives the budget.
It reaches students on many levels and shows what they know
Almost no great teacher describes their job as “delivering content.” The job is reaching students at different levels and knowing whether it landed. A tool worth keeping does both.
Jake G. from Presque Isle Middle School puts it into words:
“Excellent teaching to me means finding ways to reach your students on many levels. Wayground supports this because it allows for a quick, engaging review, without needing students to spend too much time on one topic. Students get to practice, and I get to see what they know.”
That last part matters as much as the first: “I get to see what they know.” It's not enough to deliver a lesson and hope it landed. Excellent teaching requires a feedback loop, and Wayground's real-time data gives teachers that visibility session by session, without adding hours to the grading pile. A tool that closes that loop is one worth keeping when the budget tightens.
It builds confidence alongside rigor
High expectations matter, but so does the environment in which students are asked to meet them. A keeper builds confidence rather than demanding performance without it.
Michelle S. from Gray-New Gloucester High School frames her whole philosophy around the relationship between rigor and confidence:
“Excellent teaching is meeting students where they are at and building their confidence. Wayground helps me do this by providing fun, interactive assessment reviews, self-guided lessons, and study aids. Students can work through content at their own pace, get immediate feedback, and feel successful along the way.”
“Feel successful along the way” isn't lowering the bar. It's designing an experience where students accumulate small wins that make harder challenges feel approachable. When students can work at their own pace and get immediate feedback, they're learning on their own terms, which tends to produce more durable understanding, and more durable engagement a district can see in the data.
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 self-guided 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 two signs above are what Maine's top teachers talk about more than anything else: reaching students where they are, and giving them the feedback and pacing they need to grow. Neither 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 Maine based on student activity in May 2026. All responses shared with permission.
