Portsmouth Schools: Expanding Learning with Discovery Education

Photo byDiscovery Education

Portsmouth Public Schools (PPS) today announced it has expanded its partnership with Discovery Education supporting the district’s five-year strategic plan, Expedition to 2025: Purpose. Promise. Success. In this new phase of collaboration, educators, and students in grades 7-12 across PPS will receive access to Discovery Education’s Pivot Interactives service. Pivot Interactives supports teachers as they work to help students more deeply engage in and explore natural phenomena and other scientific concepts to develop their understanding of the discipline.

PPS is made up of 23 schools and centers: three high schools, three middle schools, 13 elementary schools, three preschool centers, and an alternative education center. The school system has 13,000 students enrolled throughout the city and approximately 2,100 staff members working each day. The district’s strategic plan—Expedition to 2025: Purpose. Promise. Success.—is a multipronged approach that outlines five goals for PPS with specific objectives and action steps to ensure the school system meets those goals.

To meet the plan’s first goal of providing all students educational opportunities ensuring high academic growth, the district sought to add to its existing suite of digital resources capable of supporting instruction in the in-person or remote environment. Following a review of potential solutions, PPS selected Discovery Education’s Pivot Interactives service for use with students in grades 7-12.

Pivot Interactives, which joined the Discovery Education family of solutions in 2022, makes teaching science with active learning and scientific phenomena engaging and easy. Launched in 2012, the platform provides users with more than 10,000 authentic, interactive video-based science interactives crafted by Pivot’s expert curriculum team and teacher community. These resources, tied to state and national standards, are infused with research-based teaching practices and are simple to integrate throughout the instructional cycle.

Pivot’s activities offer opportunities for interactive learning, where students explore and learn for themselves. The service’s built-in tools—including IRIS, a first-of-its-kind color and light gauge—make for quick and accurate measurements. A unique interface allows students to change what happens in the video and see how that change affects the outcome. Easy-to-follow instructions guide students through data collection, measurement, data analysis, and interpretation, while feedback provided by both open-ended and auto-graded questions reinforces correct ideas.

Pivot Interactives will be used alongside Discovery Education Experience, the company’s K-12 learning platform, and Science Techbooks, which are already in use in all PPS K-12 classrooms, and Discovery Education Coding, which is used in PPS’s K-5 classrooms.

All PPS educators also have access to the Discovery Education Network. A global community of education professionals, the Discovery Education Network connects members across school systems and around the world through social media, virtual conferences, and in-person events, fostering valuable idea sharing and inspiration.

“Discovery Education is proud to deepen its multi-year partnership with the Portsmouth Public Schools,” said AnnMarie Oakley, Discovery Education’s Senior Manager of Education Partnerships. “The school system’s work to build engaging learning experiences for all students marks them as a leader in the effort to prepare today’s learners for success beyond graduation.”