February News for our Teachers

This month, we are pleased to see teachers and students accessing the new English Essay feature on the EdReady platform.

We also have lots of news and updates to share, including an additional improvement to the Essay feature, new college and career planning resources for families, findings from our first state-wide program evaluation and our first statewide summer conference!

Roll Out of New EDREADY Essay Function

The new English Essay function in EdReady went live in early January, supported by a series of technical emails and extended office hours. The new feature was developed to make the completion of the essay component of the Texas College Bridge English course easier, so that more students can successfully complete their essay assignments and get their English Certificates of Completion.

Since launch, we have made an additional improvement to the essay feature. Now, EdReady will show the status of the essay, as follows:

New statuses that will be shown:

‘Not Started’ (no activity of any form on the essay)
‘In Progress’ (there is activity but nothing has been submitted)
‘Submitted’ (an essay is ready to be graded for the first time)
‘Incomplete’ (the essay was graded ‘Incomplete’)
‘Revising’ (there is activity and there was at least one prior submission)
‘Resubmitted’ (the essay is ready to be graded again)
‘Pass’ (the essay was graded ‘Passed’)

As a reminder, Instructors will be notified when you have new essays to grade. Make sure your instructors have subscribed to receive the notifications.

If you have any questions or need assistance with the new Essay function, please visit our updated resources on the Help Center:

Instructions for Teachers

Instructions for Students

New College and Career Planning Resource for Families

This month, we’re excited to announce the availability of a new planning resource for parents and families, an exciting addition to the College and Career Support services we provide to teachers and school districts through Texas OnCourse.

Tomorrow Ready Texas provides customized, step-by-step action plans for families to support their teens on any post-high school pathway. It also includes specialized information for the families of students with disabilities. We hope Tomorrow Ready Texas makes your job easier too!

To make it simple to share this free resource with your students’ families, Texas OnCourse has put together a handy promo kit, which you can download from the

from their website.

The kit includes language you can easily copy and paste into emails, social media posts and graphics, and a one-pager you can print out or share digitally with parents and guardians.

Visit Texas OnCourse

Positive Preliminary Findings from Program Evaluation

Thank you to those that were able to join our webinar providing a brief overview of the recent independent evaluation of Texas College Bridge. If you registered but were unable to attend, the link to the recording and slide deck are below.

Recording – Texas College Bridge Evaluation Overview
Slide deck – Texas College Bridge Evaluation Overview
Slide deck – Complete Texas College Bridge evaluation results from The Cicero Group

We want to reemphasize that this first evaluation is just the beginning of an ongoing look at Texas College Bridge and its effectiveness in preparing students for college courses. The Texas College Bridge student population consists of students that have not been able to demonstrate college readiness prior to enrolling in our courses.

We are excited to offer students this option to build skills to be able to apply to and enroll in college where they may not have had the opportunity otherwise. To see students performing and persisting at a rate similar to students that met college readiness at an earlier stage, it proves we are making a difference in students’ lives.

Upcoming Events

District Leader, School Administrator and Teacher PLC on Tuesday, February 21 at 3:00 p.m.

Join us for a statewide PLC for District Leaders, School Administrators and Teachers to share best practices for implementing Texas College Bridge. We will also share program updates and resources to help you ensure your program is a success.

State-wide Summer Conferences on June 5 and 13

Mark your calendars for our first statewide conferences!

We’re pleased to announce that Region 10 has agreed to host our first state-wide conference in Dallas this summer, on Monday, June 5, open to representatives from all participating Texas ISDs and partnering colleges.

Can’t make it to Dallas? No worries, we also are scheduling a virtual conference option for Tuesday, June 13.

More details on both events will be coming soon.

Please feel free to share this email with district and campus CCMR leaders, curriculum and instruction staff and high school principals or with anyone you think might be interested.

Texas College Bridge is part of TEA’s Texas Home Learning program.

LEARN MORE ABOUT TEXAS COLLEGE BRIDGE

Texas College Bridge | www.TexasCollegeBridge.org