You can choose which courses to add to the site when implementing Wayfinder. While some schools and districts add all of their classes, others only add advisory, homeroom, or other courses where Wayfinder will be used.
We'll explore the pros and cons of limiting your imported courses. These pros and cons boil down to two things you should know about Wayfinder:
- Teacher lessons and activities are filtered by their courses' grade levels by default
- Students are shown lessons based on their courses' grade levels
Pros of Limiting Courses in Wayfinder
Teachers
One of the main positives to limiting courses in Wayfinder is that teachers see only the most applicable courses and content.
Let's imagine you limit the courses imported into Wayfinder to only homeroom courses. When teachers go to the "Classes" page, they will only see their homeroom class. And when they go to the "Waypoints" page, they'd only see data for their homeroom class. This helps them navigate to the most relevant classes more quickly.
In addition, lessons and activities are default filtered to the grade levels associated with the teacher's courses. Imagine, for instance, that a teacher's Homeroom Period is for 7th and 8th graders. Only importing the Homeroom Periods will highlight the Workbooks relevant to that teacher.
Students
The same idea applies to Student lessons. Students will only see lessons applicable to the grade levels of their classes. Unlike teachers, they have no other way of seeing lessons outside those grade levels.
If you would like to limit the grade-level courses a student sees, you may want to consider using this option and limiting the courses sent to Wayfinder.
Cons to Limiting Courses in Wayfinder
Limiting Teacher Use In Classes
Many schools don't want to limit teachers' exposure to lessons and classes to their advisory or homeroom periods.
Take, for example, a Math teacher who is having trouble connecting with her students. She wants to analyze how her students are doing on the core skills and take a day off from her standard curriculum to lead an activity on empathy.
This is completely possible in Wayfinder. Waypoint data and content suggestions are not limited to just advisory periods or to a course where students happened to answer a Waypoint questionnaire. The math teacher can click into her math course, see her student's responses to Waypoint data, and obtain suggestions on an engaging activity for the class.
Rostering Data
Especially when onboarding your data via Clever or Flat File, it can be difficult to filter out specific types of classes to send to Wayfinder. If you're unsure how to do so, please consult Clever or your School Information System to figure out a filtering system that works for you. Any data you send to Wayfinder will be onboarded into the app. Or, reach out to Wayfinder at support@withwayfinder.com for additional support!