Mike in front of his middle school classroom.

About 7 years ago, Mike Rutherford returned to the classroom as a middle school English and Social Studies teacher after many years in the private sector in EdTech and in professional development. He was amazed at how much the classroom had changed. The amount of qualitative data was staggering. Not only were there student notebooks, papers and projects – but the addition of students having laptops and access to thousands of amazing online resources was incredibly hard to keep on top of.

Mike created gotFeedback while he was a classroom teacher in survival mode. The constant barrage of student learning data came from so many disparate sources. Then, trying to understand if the student incorporated the previous feedback in their new work was always challenging to manage.

He felt like he spent more time searching than providing important and timely feedback to his students. Mike searched all over for EdTech tools to solve this challenge. Unable to find a tool, Mike built the precursor to today’s gotFeedback with business tools he used in the private sector. This helped him capture the important learning conversations he was having with his students and to easily show growth over time. Many of his colleagues began using this Collaborative Learning System (CLS) in their classrooms as well. This proved to him, he was on to something very useful for teachers and students!

After leaving the classroom, Mike spent eight months talking to teachers, students, parents and administrators to test and refine gotFeedback so that this platform would meet the sophisticated needs of the contemporary classroom.

So, you have read this far… Is your question why was Mike’s classroom called the Tetradecagon? Well, in multiple discussions with his sixth graders, he often referred to “the world outside of the four walls of our classroom.” Being middle schoolers, some of them (and of course eventually all) argued that there were not four walls, but because of multiple protrusions there were 14 sides that they considered walls. Our geometry vocabulary ended at decagon. So after a quick internet search by an astute middle schooler, Room 214 became known as the “Tetradecagon”!