Baltimore Social Innovation Journal, Fall 2016 Fall 2016 | Page 28
Tracking Success from A to Z
A young teacher takes her brainchild from fledgling to adulthood.
By Lisa Simeone
At the start of a new school, teacher Lida
Zlatic met a class of Baltimore City middle
schoolers who had two years of Spanish
under their belts. She wanted to assess their
proficiency before starting her lesson plans,
so she asked them to write down ten of their
favorite Spanish words. Out of a class of over
thirty students, not one of them could come
up with a list of ten.
Zlatic was already an experienced
teacher. She was also a decorated scholar.
Born in what is now Croatia, in the former
Yugoslavia, and raised in the U.S., she
speaks three languages fluently and has
working proficiency in three others. She was
used to tackling problems and solving them.
But she was shocked by what she found in
that classroom. She also began to doubt
language teaching methods in general.
She started reading up on cognition,
learning about the way the brain processes
information, and interviewed hundreds of
teachers.
“If you ask any foreign language teacher
what the biggest time suck in the classroom
is, they’ll all say, ‘vocabulary’. It takes up
the most time, yet students don’t retain it. I
came up with a method that I later realized
aligned with research on how to learn
better.”
pg. 2 7
Zlatic combined good old-fashioned
flashcards with technological savvy. The
result, after trial and error, was ClassTracks.
A simple, intuitive computer program,
ClassTracks has been tested on everyone
from fifth graders to adults. It not only works,
says Zlatic, but it’s deliberately data driven:
“It allows you to track how your class did.
It shows teacher and student what was easy,
what was hard. You understand your own
learning skills.”
But how is it different from Rosetta Stone,
the popular language-learning software?
“Those middle-school students I told you
about?” Zlatic says. “They had been using
Rosetta Stone for two years. Rosetta Stone is
great for adults who are self-motivated and
highly educated, not for school kids.”
ClassTracks launched in January 2015
in one classroom in California. Zlatic and
her team got feedback and tweaked the
product. A year later, they have an updated
version. About 200 teachers around the
country, including in Baltimore, are using it.
Zlatic thinks the program will be especially
useful for ESOL – English for Speakers of
Other Languages – classes. There are many
immigrants in Baltimore, from all over the