Creating Your Xello Lesson Sequence

Lessons not only deliver content, they also allow you to:

• Identify and communicate what students in each grade should accomplish
• Track progress towards those objectives
• Support educators in meeting expectations with additional teaching resources

Lessons are an extremely flexible tool. The out-of-the-box lessons are interactive experiences where students acquire key skills and knowledge and explore core future readiness concepts. Most lessons have prerequisite activities that students must complete in Xello before they can begin the lesson, like saving careers, completing assessments, or adding to their experiences timeline.

You can also create custom lessons for additional learning objectives and activities not covered by Xello’s interactive lessons. Custom lessons can have prerequisite activities to ensure that students are completing the activities you want them to.

Who Determines the Lesson Sequence

The lesson sequence should be set at the district level. This establishes consistent expectations for students and enables effective tracking and reporting. Xello Administrators at the district can set up the lessons based on what they want students to accomplish.

Best Practices

• Bring together people from different areas, like Counseling, CTE, Curriculum, to collaborate on the learning objectives and requirements.
• Use the worksheets in this article to facilitate your discussions.

When to Set Your Lesson Sequence

It’s important that your lesson sequence be set before you introduce Xello to students, and it’s ideally set before your educators are trained on the program. This way your students and educators will know what to do right from the start.

If you need to make changes after the program is launched, it’s not a problem. You can change your configuration at any time.

Best Practices

• If you do change the lessons during the year, be sure to let staff know that a change has been made and why.
• Review your lesson sequence every year and make changes during summer break.

Steps to Creating Your Lesson Sequence

1. Get to know Xello’s Lessons
2. Select the Xello lessons students in each grade should complete
3. Create custom lessons for any other learning objectives
4. Set up the sequence in Xello’s Educator Tools

How Students Access Lessons

For students in grades 6 through 12, lessons are front and center when they first log in to Xello. Required lessons, that is, those marked as “Core”, appear first. A progress meter shows students how far they’ve come and what they have left to do.

Students can access lessons from previous grades, as well as non-core lessons for their grade level through the View All Lessons option.

Good to know!

• Most lessons take 20 to 40 minutes to complete. Students don’t have to finish them in one go. They can stop and pick up exactly where they left off at any time.
• When a student finishes a lesson it will move to the bottom of the list and show that it’s been completed.
• In your educator account, you can track aggregate lesson completion and you can view individual students’ work.

Elementary students also find their lessons, called Missions for students in grades 3 through 5, right on their dashboard. Students can click View All to see lessons from previous grades, revisit their answers, and explore anything they haven’t completed yet.

Steps to Creating Your Lesson Sequence

Step 1: Get to know Xello’s Lessons

With integrated lessons, students build essential skills and knowledge that can help them succeed in the real world. Personalized based on their work in Xello, lessons give students the chance to reflect, reassess, and build communication, problem solving, and teamwork skills to ensure smooth transitions between critical life stages.

Step 2: Select the lessons students in each grade should complete

You’ll want to ensure your lesson sequence reflects your district’s needs, goals, and curriculum. Consider where and when students will be completing these lessons and supporting activities. Will it be through homeroom, advisement periods, core classes, or other times in the schedule? Who will be responsible for delivering the content: counselors, core curriculum teachers, specialized teachers?

If you’re using Xello to fulfill state or local mandates, those requirements should be reflected in your lesson sequence to make sure students are completing the activities and gaining the knowledge to meet those expectations. Connect with your Success Manager if you need support with mapping Xello’s lessons to your state mandate.

Settings You Need to Know

• Core Lessons: Lessons marked as “Core” are considered mandatory and comprise students’ primary progress tracking. Non-core lessons can still be accessed and completed by students, but are optional.
• Active Status: Active lessons are available to students; lessons that are not active will not appear to students.
• Grades: Lessons can be assigned to one or more grades. Students in each grade the lesson is assigned access it from their dashboard. It will only show in the highest grade it was assigned and not in previous years when they click View All Lessons. Students complete the lesson once.

Step 3: Create custom lessons for any other learning objectives

If you have activities or learning objectives beyond what’s covered by Xello’s embedded lessons, you can create custom lessons of your own on any topic you’d like. It will appear on students’ dashboard alongside the Xello lessons. To complete a custom lesson, students can enter information in the text area provided, upload a file, or both.

Here’s how to create a custom lesson:

1. Pick the grade(s) for the lesson
2. Create and enter the name that will show on the student dashboard
3. Choose which, if any, activities in Xello they need to complete, e.g. creating a resume or completing an assessment
   

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4. Enter instructions for students to complete the lesson, which can include links or templates
5. Click Save
   

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Step 4: Set up the sequence in Xello’s Educator Tools

In the left menu of Educator Tools, click Features and select Lessons.

Click on the name of a lesson to learn more about the learning objectives, specific activities, and prerequisites students complete before starting that lesson.

• To move a lesson from one grade to another, click and drag the lesson card.
  

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• To change additional settings, click on the lesson name and from near the bottom of the page, select Edit.
  • To add a lesson to multiple grades, choose the grades the lesson should be assigned to. Students only need to complete the lesson once, but they can complete it in any of the selected grades.
  • Toggle the Core status to set whether the lesson is required or optional.
  • Toggle the Active status to make a lesson available or unavailable to students.
    

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• Be sure to save any changes you’ve made!

Check Your Changes

Once you’ve created the lesson sequence, you can use your demo student account to check that everything is configured correctly.

You’ll need to check the lessons for grades 3-5 and the lessons for grades 6-12 separately. Select the highest available grade for each grade band.

• Make sure the core lessons for that grade are showing up by default on the dashboard in the order you want.
• Click View All Lessons to see any non-core lessons for that grade.
• Check the previous grades to ensure everything looks right.

Lesson Sequence Worksheets