Teacher Guide

Everything you can do as a Teacher on DoCurious -- managing classrooms, assignments, and student progress.

What You Can Do

As a Teacher, you have full control over your classroom experience on DoCurious:

• View rosters for your assigned classes
• Create new classes and add students from the school roster
• Browse the challenge catalog and assign challenges to your classes
• Set due dates and custom instructions for each assignment
• Track per-student completion progress across all your classes
• Review student Track Records and leave private feedback
• Design Learning Paths that sequence challenges into guided progressions
• View student reflection responses and class-level SEL analytics
• Request purchases from your School Admin for paid challenges
• Communicate with parents through the Parent Communication Hub
• Switch between your personal account and school context at any time

Getting Started

Teachers do not self-register for school access. A School Admin (SA) adds you in one of two ways:

1. Direct invite -- The SA enters your name and email. You receive an invitation email, create your password (or link your existing account), and your school affiliation is established automatically.
2. Invite link -- The SA generates a shareable invite link. You open the link, authenticate, and accept the school affiliation.

If you already have a personal DoCurious account, accepting a school invitation adds the school context to your existing account. Your personal challenges, Track Records, and communities remain separate.

See Accounts for the full onboarding flow and context-switching model.

Your Dashboard

The Teacher Dashboard (/school) is your command center. It provides a class-level overview with:

• Class cards -- Each of your assigned classes displayed with student count, active assignment count, grade level, and status
• Pending reviews -- Track Records submitted by your students that are awaiting your private feedback
• Active assignments -- A summary of assignments you have published, with completion progress bars (completed / in progress / not started)
• Student engagement -- Aggregate metrics showing daily/weekly active students across your classes
• Quick actions -- Create a new assignment, open the review queue, or navigate to a specific class

The Classroom Dashboard (a Wave 3 toolkit feature) adds a gradebook-style view with Recharts visualizations for deeper progress and engagement analysis.

Key Features

Classroom Management

You can create classes, assign students, and manage your class rosters.

• Create a class -- Provide a name (max 100 characters), optional description (max 300 characters), grade level, and yourself as primary teacher
• Add students -- Search students from the school roster by name or filter by grade, then add them to your class. A student can be in multiple classes simultaneously.
• Class community -- Each class automatically creates a private institutional community with three feeds (Bucket List, Track Record, Discussion). You are the default moderator.
• Archive or delete -- Archive a class at end of term (data preserved, hidden from active view) or delete it permanently. Students' personal work is never affected.

See School Administration for full class lifecycle details.

Challenge Assignments

Assigning challenges is how you bring DoCurious content into your classroom. The platform frames assignments as gifted challenges or invitations rather than homework.

1. Browse -- Use the Explore page to find a challenge by category, difficulty, or keyword
2. Select classes -- Multi-select from your assigned classes
3. Configure -- Set an optional due date (soft deadline, no auto-penalty), mark as required or optional, and add custom instructions (max 500 characters)
4. Publish -- Students see the assignment on their dashboard immediately

Paid challenges: When you assign a paid challenge, the system prompts you to submit a purchase request to your SA. The SA reviews and approves or denies the request. You are notified when the decision is made.

See School Administration for the full assignment flow.

Verification and Reviews

You provide private feedback on student Track Records through a dedicated review queue.

• Review queue -- The TeacherReviews page (/school/reviews) lists Track Records awaiting your feedback, filterable by class and assignment
• Private feedback -- Click "Private Feedback" on any student Track Record to write rich-text comments. This is separate from public community comments.
• Visibility -- Your feedback is visible only to: the student, other teachers assigned to the same class, the SA, and the student's linked parents
• Notifications -- Students receive an in-app notification when you leave feedback. Parents of under-13 students see it on their parent dashboard.

Note: Teachers provide feedback, not formal verification. Track Record verification (approve/reject) is handled by DoCurious staff.

See Track Records for the full verification workflow.

Learning Path Designer

The Learning Path Designer (Wave 4 toolkit feature) lets you sequence challenges into structured progressions for your classes.

• Drag-and-drop interface to order challenges into a guided learning journey
• Align paths with curriculum standards
• Assign a Learning Path to one or more classes so students progress through challenges in order

See Gamification for how Learning Paths fit into the broader progression system.

Reflection and SEL

After completing a challenge, students respond to structured reflection prompts. As a teacher, you have two tools for working with this data:

• Reflection configuration -- Configure which reflection prompts appear for your assigned challenges. Prompts layer: platform defaults + school-level prompts + your assignment-specific prompts. Prompt complexity adapts to student age.
• Reflection Analytics -- The ReflectionAnalytics page (/school/reflection-analytics) shows class-level aggregate data on student engagement, confidence, and social-emotional growth. Individual responses are private by default; you can view a specific student's responses with appropriate permissions.

Reflection is never graded. It exists for self-awareness, not assessment.

See Reflection for prompt types, privacy rules, and the SEL tracking model.

Parent Communication

The Parent Communication Hub (/school/parent-communication) provides a centralized view for managing parent interactions:

• Compose messages to parents of students in your classes
• View consent status for each student (relevant for under-13 COPPA tiers)
• Manage parent contact information
• Parents receive weekly digest emails summarizing their child's school activity, including your feedback

See School Administration for the full parent integration model.

Permissions Summary

Action	Teacher	SA
View assigned class rosters	Yes	All classes
View student Track Records (school challenges)	Own classes	All
Provide private feedback on Track Records	Yes	Yes
Assign challenges to classes	Own classes	All
Request paid challenge purchases	Yes	Yes
Create classes	Yes	Yes
Add/remove students in own classes	Yes	All classes
Modify school roster (add/remove students)	No	Yes
Change school settings	No	Yes
View school-wide analytics	No	Yes
Manage teacher accounts	No	Yes
Send surveys	No	Yes
Approve purchase requests	No	Yes

Context Switching

Your DoCurious account supports both a personal context and a school context. This works like Slack workspaces -- one login, two separate views.

• School context -- Access your classes, assignments, student progress, and review queue. Everything here is scoped to your school.
• Personal context -- Discover challenges for yourself, build your own Bucket List, create personal Track Records, join communities, and earn XP and badges. None of this is visible to your school or students.

Switching between contexts does not require logging out. Your personal content and school content are kept completely separate.

See Accounts for full details on context switching.