Annotated List of Links
Strategies to Engage Unreached Families
- Strategic communication–maintain communication logs, coordinate across teams, and keep track of relevant family details
- Virtual engagement–use social media, special mailings, and even a personalized video
- Go deeper–connect through emergency contacts, community partners, family friends/peers, or other trusted adults
Strengthening Student Attendance and Assignment Completion During the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Go wide–in support, celebration, and communication
- Hone in–use best staff members to build relationships, keep track of barriers, develop action plans
- Work one-on-one–for students who need an individualized approach
Strategies for Engaging Students in Virtual Lessons
- Engagement comes before instruction
- Instruction needs to engage students
- Problems (symptoms) and possible solutions
8 Strategies to Improve Participation in Your Virtual Classroom
- Synchronous strategies (spider web discussion, using chat, flip your classroom, adapt Think-Pair-Share for CCS/Zoom, show and tell)
- Asynchronous strategies (online forums, virtual gallery walks, brainstorming online)
10 ways to improve student engagement in virtual classrooms
- Break the ice with Poll Everywhere (which looks great!)
- Create a community structure using a message board or even a Twitter hashtag
- Build individual learning plans
- Create short, captivating lessons
- Encourage or require face to face interactions
- Find ways for students to DO, not just read or listen
- Add flexibility
- Let students collaborate
- Communicate in multiple different ways—email, virtual office hours, consultations
- Ask for feedback, maybe anonymously
This one lists common strategies used with older kids and how to adapt them for the virtual classroom.
- Sort It Out–a way to do concept mapping
- Online Fishbowl–takes a Fishbowl discussion into the virtual classroom
- Expert Groups Investigations–gets small groups diving deeper into subtopics; they then share what they learned with the whole class
- Collaborative Annotations–using a 2-column chart in Google Docs
- Google Map Adventures–can chart the path of a story, for example
- Spotify Playlist–used to connect literary themes/main ideas with music
- Scavenger Hunts–which can help with close reading of text
- Online Discussions–using FlipGrid or Padlet
Ditto for younger kids.
- Word Wall–using Bitmoji Classroom or Padlet
- Jigsaw–with Google Slides
- Scavenger Hunts–focused on finding objects in the home
- Choice Boards–with Seesaw, Padlet, or FlipGrid
- Storytime–using graphic organizers on Storyline Online or Google Slide
- Tell Me How–using Seesaw or FlipGrid
- I Do, We Do, You Do–with conference sessions
- Learning Stations–with Google Slides
- Acrostic Poem–in Google Drawing
- Fishbowl Discussion or Problem-Solving Session
Personally, I love to open a CSS with a few corny jokes or a trivia quiz. At the end of every month, we have a Spirit Day. The kids get to choose the theme of the day. Our first one was “Bring Your Pet to School Day.” Nearly every child brought a pet, from a dog or a cat, to a bunny or a chicken. It was a blast! And it was something we never could have done in our brick-and-mortar schools.
As Jean-Luc Picard says, “Engage!”
Wow, Jan, this is a lot of good ideas in one space! Kudos. We are really on our analogy A game these days, aren’t we?
You are 100% correct. Engagement is the answer. We can’t teach until that has been established. Period.
Whatever we can do to help kids overcome their barriers to engaging in learning, that is what we should be doing. This is an overwhelming time for so many. We must go the extra mile to make connections. I hope that lasting relationships of mutual trust will come of it in the end.
I appreciate all these suggestions, there are some great ideas here! Our school team has a pretty well coordinated system for tracking home/family/student contact and communicating with one another about the kids we have concerns over. That sense of shared responsibility has really helped, and I feel like communication has been the key to much of our engagement success.
On paper, our “attendance” or engagement might look rough. (Neighboring high schools are purporting 95-100% attendance, which is weird considering how many failing grades they’re also reporting…but that’s a whole nother blog post.) The thing about my school’s internal and external communication protocols: we can tell you, to the kid, what barriers exist to their engagement, and we can tell you what we’ve tried and what we’re thinking of trying next. They’re living through a lot right now, and simply knowing the details of their lives goes a long, long way.