How i-Ready Specialist Dr. Eugene Thomas Helps Teachers Turn Data into Direction
Every year, teachers receive pages and pages of benchmark assessment data. The numbers can show where students are thriving, where they’re struggling, and where instruction needs to shift. But when teachers don’t know how to execute proper data analysis, the insights they gather fall short. The Wilmington Learning Collaborative has established a way to avoid that outcome through Dedicated Professional Learning Specialists (DPLS) like Dr. Eugene Thomas, who provide critical assistance with i-Ready benchmark interpretation.
What is i-Ready?
i-Ready is an adaptive diagnostic and instructional tool the WLC uses across its four Christina School District schools, including the Bayard School, Maurice Pritchett Sr. Academy, Pulaski Early Education Center, and Stubbs Early Education Center. Students take the “i-Ready Inform” assessment three times a year, giving teachers a fresh, detailed picture of where each student stands.
The goal is to turn those assessment results into actionable insights to help educators identify student needs, track progress, and deliver precise instruction. With the help of the WLC, school districts can receive growth-oriented support to make these changes.
The Need for a Helping Hand
About two years ago, the Bayard School within the Christina School District was rolling out a new i-Ready math curriculum and hit a wall familiar to many educators: students were taking the i-Ready assessments, but they didn’t know how to effectively interpret and use the results to produce an adjusted curriculum.
The WLC’s first response was a series of early-morning professional learning sessions. Finding these meetings helpful, teachers noted that ongoing, real-time support would continue to enhance their lesson planning.
While helpful, teachers needed ongoing support that acknowledged the day-to-day nuances of their classroom when making effective lesson-planning decisions. With the school district already taking advantage of the PLS model, the WLC saw the need to create a supplementary opportunity that picks up where those fixed sessions left off, closing the gaps in real time rather than competing for the same ground. Supplementation, not supplantation.
The WLC’s solution? The creation and funding of the Dedicated Professional Learning Specialist (DPLS) role, one Dr. Eugene Thomas has served in for the past year and a half inside four Christina School District schools that use i-Ready. Embedded on-site, Dr. Thomas helps teachers, paraprofessionals, and leaders turn i-Ready assessment results into a real instructional plan through a steady, year-round support model.
What’s the Difference: Dedicated PLS vs PLS
The Dedicated PLS model is distinct from the traditional WLC PLS model, and both serve separate but complementary purposes within the organization.
Where a standard PLS engagement occurs on predetermined dates, the Dedicated PLS model transforms professional learning into a flexible, continuous partnership embedded throughout the school year. Teachers get ongoing support for real-time implementation, and principals get regular consultative support to strengthen instructional leadership.
This distinction fosters cross-school consistency, giving Wilmington-area schools a unified approach to instruction even when they sit in different districts.
| PLS | Dedicated PLS |
| Supports multiple districts | Serves one network (WLC) |
| Provides fixed session | Provides continuous, flexible support |
| Offers limited follow-up | Offers sustained, ongoing engagement |
| Works independently with districts | Co-plans with leadership and aligns support |
| Delivers isolated professional learning | Embeds professional learning within daily practice |
A Conversation with Dr. Eugene Thomas
To understand what that day-to-day partnership actually looks like, we sat down with Dr. Thomas to talk about his work in the Christina School District, the misconceptions he untangles most often, and the classroom changes that spur on his work.
The Bayard School
One Christina School District school Dr. Thomas serves is Bayard. His work looks different depending on the grade, but every action builds toward the same goal: real relationship-building and timely support at each school, within each grade, and for each teacher.
“Grades K-5 students at Bayard use i-Ready Classroom Mathematics as their core curriculum, while middle school students use i-Ready Inform for assessment and i-Ready Personalized Instruction to fill learning gaps,” he explains. “At the elementary level, I am deeply embedded in supporting math instruction, helping teachers build classrooms where students do the thinking and talk through their reasoning together. Across every grade band, I help teachers use i-Ready Inform results and instructional grouping reports to make more targeted decisions.”
The Biggest Misconception
Teachers often assume that once students see their i-Ready results, they understand what the numbers mean and what to do next. Dr. Thomas explains that understanding “doesn’t happen on its own — it takes intentional data chats where teachers help students unpack their scores. When students become assessment-capable learners who know where they are and where they need to go, that knowledge becomes a powerful tool for their own learning. Helping students understand their typical growth and stretch growth goals really provides a lever that can put students on the path to grade-level proficiency.”
A second misconception shows up at the growth level, Dr. Thomas explains: “It’s easy to compare beginning-of-year results to end-of-year results and stop there. Part of my role is helping teachers and leaders also look at growth year-over-year, not just within a single year, so we get a fuller picture of a student’s trajectory instead of starting the conversation over each fall.”
Closing Skill Gaps
Assessment data helps leaders and classroom educators pinpoint exactly where students have gaps in foundational skills. Digging into this information with more precision helps all students access grade-level materials.
Teachers use assessment data to identify the specific prerequisite skills a student might be missing, then prioritize the gaps that matter most for accessing grade-level, Tier 1 instruction. That targeted approach goes further than trying to reteach everything at once.
From Passive to Active Students
i-Ready seeks to do more than provide a sheet of numbers. Data helps build student ownership of their own growth.
“After a student’s first assessment, teachers can see that student’s Typical Growth target — essentially what progress we’d expect by the final diagnostic window. Teachers then meet individually with students to figure out learning and growth goals. We follow up with ongoing data chats throughout the year rather than a single conversation. By the second diagnostic, teachers check whether each student is on track and adjust support if they’re not, rather than continuing with a plan that isn’t working. The impact has been meaningful: students increasingly know their own strengths and where to focus their effort. That shifts them from passive recipients of instruction to active participants in their own learning,” says Dr. Thomas.
Shift in Confidence
Dr. Thomas has also noticed a positive shift in how teachers are engaging with the work, not just in the numbers themselves. Teachers and leaders are focused on building student ownership of learning, backed by effective, engaging instruction.
This year, K–5 teachers using i-Ready Classroom Mathematics as their core curriculum shifted their energy toward unit and lesson internalization, helping teachers unpack instruction more deeply.
“i-Ready Classroom Mathematics is a discourse-based program, which is a shift from traditional ways of teaching math. Teachers have told me directly that over time they feel more and more comfortable with the curriculum and they know what they’re working to improve,” Dr. Thomas says.
School-Wide Impact
“My work touches principals, teachers, and paraprofessionals differently, but all three connect around the same goal,” Dr. Thomas explains, “making sure the right people have the right data and tools to support instruction and better student outcomes.”
With principals, he reviews building-level data both in isolation and against the broader district, helping leaders sharpen their own priorities. With teachers, the work happens in the classroom, building comfort with the i-Ready programs and using diagnostic results to guide instruction. With paraprofessionals, he’s trained them on the core math curriculum and instructor-led resources like Tools for Instruction, “so they can meaningfully support small groups rather than simply supervise them.”
“Together, these three levels reinforce each other,” he adds. “Principals set data-informed priorities, teachers deliver instruction suited to their grade band, and paraprofessionals extend that support in small groups — all working from the same data and the same set of connected programs.”
What Leaders Can Do
When asked what would help teachers feel more supported around assessment data, Dr. Thomas points to consistency: “The best way to ensure the success of any program they might implement is to bring in partners or vendors who provide consistent support, not just show up once a year.”
This year, he made it a priority to loop in the district’s math curriculum specialist and math coach whenever he was leading a session or on-site. This “led to increased, deeper engagement, the opportunity to co-lead some of that work, and having even more productive conversations directly with school leaders.”
He’d also like to see schools lean further into coherence, using i-Ready’s prerequisite skills report to focus on the gaps that connect most directly to that week’s Tier 1 instruction, rather than pulling data in isolation. This August, he’s running a summer math institute with the Collaborative to help teachers build confidence with math before the school year starts. “None of this works,” he adds, “without district leaders continuing to make that kind of access and coordination possible.”
Why it Matters
When asked about his “why,” Dr. Thomas spoke to the ongoing impact that snowballs with time. “Investments in ongoing professional learning like this don’t always show up in the numbers after just one year,” Dr. Thomas explains. “With consistent support and capacity-building over time, we should see that movement. One moment that keeps me grounded is when a teacher told me: ‘I didn’t enjoy teaching math, but now it’s one of my favorite subjects to teach.’ That mattered to me because shifts in student outcomes don’t happen without shifts in teacher confidence and practice first. That’s usually the leading indicator before the data catches up.”
Turning Data Into Direction, One School at a Time
The WLC aims to achieve Three Big Shifts within Wilmington Schools: Students First, Connected Schools, and Purposeful Partnerships. The i-Ready initiative lives under Connected Schools, a shift that cultivates school collaboration across the WLC network through equitable access to learning opportunities and shared resourcing and responsibility.
Dr. Thomas’s work is a clear picture of what Connected Schools looks like in practice: a partnership that meets teachers where they are, month after month, shifting teacher confidence and preparedness for the better.
As Dr. Thomas puts it, “That’s what this work is ultimately about: educators who are equipped and motivated to deliver the instruction that will move the needle for students.”
The WLC is proud to make this change possible through its development and implementation of the Dedicated PLS model, turning i-Ready data into direction that makes a difference within Wilmington schools.
