Campfire Session
Learn how K–12 teachers can use Flint to align lessons with standards, upload syllabi and curriculum, and track student progress toward mastery.
Teddy Lane, Customer Success Engineer at Flint
In this Curriculum, Standards, and Syllabi Campfire Session, the Flint team demonstrated how teachers and administrators can connect curriculum documents, academic standards, syllabi, and unit plans directly to their classes. The session focused on setting up school-wide curriculum, creating standards-aligned activities, giving Sparky deeper instructional context, and using student performance data to track progress toward learning goals.
Alongside live demonstrations from both science and English classrooms, the discussion explored practical implementation questions from educators, including whether administrators or teachers should upload standards, how to access preset curricula, how to organize classes across academic years, and how schools can incorporate custom or internally developed curriculum frameworks.
Content covered in this session includes:
Setting up curriculum and standards at the school level so teachers can access the instructional frameworks relevant to their classes without repeatedly finding and uploading the same documents.
Using Flint’s preset curriculum options, including Common Core, NGSS, and the National Curriculum in England.
Uploading custom curriculum files when a school uses state-specific standards, internally developed learning frameworks, or curricula that are not yet available as presets.
Creating academic segments that connect curriculum documents to subjects, departments, grade levels, or other school-defined categories.
Reviewing, editing, approving, and manually adding individual standards after Flint extracts them from an uploaded curriculum document.
Assigning school-level curriculum and academic segments to individual classes so Sparky can reference the appropriate standards when supporting teachers and students.
Adding class context that explains a teacher’s instructional approach, pedagogical priorities, and broader goals for student learning.
Using Sparky to explore unfamiliar standards, identify connections between lesson ideas and learning objectives, and brainstorm standards-aligned classroom experiences.
Designing an NGSS-aligned chemistry flame test lab focused on using the periodic table to understand patterns in electron arrangement and elemental properties.
Moving from lesson ideation in a Flint chat directly into the activity builder without needing to rewrite or re-enter the original instructional context.
Reviewing and adjusting the standards attached to an activity so the experience remains focused on the intended learning objective.
Troubleshooting missing standards by manually adding them to a class and asking Sparky to revise an activity using the newly added standard.
Generating supplemental classroom materials, including lab handouts, learning objectives, equipment lists, procedures, safety precautions, observation tables, and sentence stems.
Using Flint’s document, whiteboard, code, and equation tools to create different types of instructional materials and student learning experiences.
Uploading course syllabi and unit plans so Sparky understands what students are learning, how the class is structured, what policies apply, and where an individual lesson fits within the broader curriculum.
Giving Sparky context about upcoming and previously taught content so it can support students without revealing information before the teacher intends to introduce it.
Analyzing a Common Core-aligned close reading activity for Romeo and Juliet to identify class-wide strengths, areas for improvement, and evidence of student understanding.
Reviewing individual student sessions, rubric performance, misconceptions, and moments where students demonstrated or recovered their understanding.
Generating follow-up activities based on class-wide or individual learning gaps before moving on to the next lesson or unit.
Using live activity insights to identify students who may be stuck, repeatedly skipping a question, or in need of additional support during class.
Tracking how many standards have been introduced, assessed, and mastered across a class.
Viewing standards performance at different timescales, including across an entire course or within a specific instructional unit.
Deciding whether curriculum setup should be managed centrally by administrators or individually by teachers based on the school’s structure and implementation needs.
Organizing classes across academic years by creating new terms while preserving access to previous classes and instructional materials.
Importing selected activities and resources from a previous term into a new school year.
Answering educator questions about preset standards, teacher access, custom curriculum uploads, academic terms, and best practices for preparing Flint before the start of the school year.
Slides from the presentation can be found here.
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00:00 Introduction
Teddy Lane welcomes educators to the session and introduces the focus on Flint’s new curriculum, standards, and syllabi features.
He explains that the webinar will explore the experience from three perspectives: administrators setting up curriculum at the school level, teachers applying standards and instructional context within their classes, and students engaging with standards-aligned activities.
Teddy previews two live classroom demonstrations—an NGSS-aligned chemistry lab and a Common Core-aligned English activity—before concluding with an open Q&A.
He also encourages participants to share questions and feedback throughout the session, emphasizing that educator input helps shape how Flint’s curriculum tools continue to evolve.
00:21 Icebreaking news
Teddy invites attendees to share where they are joining from, whether their school year has started, and what they hope to learn from the session.
The opening conversation asks educators to reflect on a lesson or project they have been thinking about revising over the summer.
Teddy shares an example from his own experience teaching math, describing how he would revisit and improve a project about Voronoi diagrams each year.
The discussion frames curriculum planning as an iterative process and introduces the session’s broader focus on helping teachers connect instructional ideas to standards, class context, and student learning goals.
03:35 NGSS Spectroscopy Lab Science Demo
Teddy begins the first live demonstration with a chemistry flame test lab aligned to the NGSS standard HS-PS1-1.
He explains how administrators can add preset curriculum frameworks such as NGSS, Common Core, and the National Curriculum in England, upload custom curriculum documents, organize them using academic segments, and review the individual standards Flint extracts.
The walkthrough then shifts to the teacher experience, showing how a teacher can connect the appropriate curriculum to a chemistry class, approve imported standards, and give Sparky access to the instructional context needed to support lesson planning.
Using a Flint chat, Teddy asks Sparky to help design a flame test experiment that connects student observations to electron arrangements, spectroscopy, and patterns within the periodic table.
The demonstration shows how teachers can first brainstorm and refine a lesson conversationally before turning the discussion directly into a Flint activity without rewriting the original prompt.
Teddy reviews the standards attached to the activity, explains how to narrow the lesson to a single learning objective, and troubleshoots a missing standard by manually adding it to the class.
The session also demonstrates how teachers can ask Sparky to generate supporting materials for the lab, including learning objectives, equipment lists, procedures, safety precautions, observation tables, and sentence stems.
Teddy concludes the science example by explaining how Flint can support different stages of instruction, from opening questions and lesson exploration to in-class activities, post-lab reflection, and follow-up analysis.
26:13 Common Core – Romeo and Juliet ELA Demo
The second demonstration shifts from science to a ninth-grade English class studying Act 3 of Romeo and Juliet.
Teddy shows how a teacher can connect Common Core ELA standards to a class and upload additional instructional documents such as a course syllabus and unit plan.
He explains that these files give Sparky deeper context about the course structure, learning objectives, classroom expectations, grading policies, AI guidelines, assigned texts, essential questions, and the sequence of instruction across a unit.
The walkthrough highlights how this context can help Sparky understand what students have already learned, what they will encounter next, and what information should not be revealed prematurely.
Teddy then opens a completed close-reading activity and demonstrates how teachers can review class-wide student performance.
The analysis identifies student strengths, areas for improvement, and specific moments within conversations where students demonstrated understanding or struggled with a concept.
Teachers can use these insights to generate follow-up activities for the entire class or for individual students who need additional support.
The demonstration also explores live monitoring tools that help teachers identify students who may be stuck, repeatedly skipping questions, or requiring help during an activity.
Teddy reviews individual student sessions, rubric scores, teacher feedback, and personalized follow-up recommendations before moving to the class outcomes dashboard.
The outcomes view shows how many standards have been added, taught, assessed, and mastered, while also highlighting specific examples of mastery, misconceptions, developing understanding, and recovered learning.
Teddy explains that teachers can filter this analysis by date to evaluate standards performance across an entire course or within a specific unit.
40:05 Q&A
The Q&A focuses on practical questions about setting up curriculum, managing standards, and organizing classes within Flint.
Teddy clarifies that administrators can preload standards and curriculum for the entire school, reducing the amount of setup required from individual teachers.
He explains that schools can use Flint’s built-in curriculum presets or upload their own standards documents when working with state frameworks, custom curricula, or other instructional systems.
The discussion also covers how teachers can upload curriculum files independently when a school administrator has not yet added them at the workspace level.
Educators ask about organizing previous classes, and Teddy demonstrates how schools can use academic terms to separate current courses from past school years while preserving access to older classes and materials.
He also explains how teachers can import selected activities and resources from a previous term into a new academic year.
Additional questions explore whether curriculum setup should be managed centrally or left to individual teachers, with Teddy outlining the trade-off between greater administrative work upfront and a simpler teacher experience later.
The session concludes with guidance on accessing Common Core presets, assigning curriculum to individual classes, working with school administrators, and sharing new Flint workflows with colleagues.
Teddy closes by inviting educators to continue asking questions through Flint’s office hours, community spaces, and future Campfire sessions.
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