Whatever it Takes

I have hit a little bit of a static time within my classroom these past few months. I haven't had many new teaching strategies I've been trying as I have been focusing much of my time leading my colleagues in completing the Ohio 5-Step Process as Teacher Based Teams. Leadership is also the focus of the 4th year of the Ohio Resident Educator Program which I have been working on as well. It feels refreshing that this week I have finally been able to focus more on helping individual students.
As I have said before, one of the strengths of an online environment is being about to work with students on an individual basis, in fact it is much more rare for me to work with students as a group. This week I have been focusing on engaging students who have not been successful on their own as of yet. Previous to this week I sent out letters, made calls to parents and students, and sent countless emails to attempt to engage these reluctant learners.

This week, I tried putting my money where my mouth is so to speak and invited these struggling students to one-on-one synchronous sessions. For these sessions I prepared slides that walk students through each step of every project in my course. I invited students to attend via phone calls and individual emails (with their names in the subject line!). Once a student entered the classroom I would direct the students through each project step-by-step using the slides on the board and demonstrating each step over the my document camera. These sessions did get pretty lengthy but students were willing to stay, with the goal of passing the course at the end of our time working together. I'll be honest, until this week I have had lackluster attendance in my synchronous sessions, but these catch up interventions are working their magic on some of my most difficult to reach students.

Shifting the Focus of Live Instruction

At the beginning of every new school year, we return to the classroom with new focuses, technology, and challenges. Attendance has always been a struggle with live instruction in teaching online for me. In the past it has been offered as a structured lesson once or twice a week which for many classes focused on direct instruction. These sessions have always been optional for high school students as the online environment attracts students who prefer or need flexibility in their education. Because the lessons were optional, it was common that we would only get 5-10% of our students attending them. I have always enjoyed teaching these lessons and I believe my students have gotten a lot out of them in the past.

This year however, my school is trying something new and emphasizing more activity-based instruction in the live sessions and more hours of availability for one-on-one help. I am available for students 3 hours a day, 3 days a week to help students one-on-one in an open live lesson. So far, I have discovered the following pros and cons about the new arrangement:

Pros:

• Students no longer need to make an appointment or call to get one-on-one help which should increase the number of students getting assistance they need.
• Because I have so much live instruction time, I find myself inviting individual students to work with me on assignments they struggled with (previous to this year, I invited students as an entire class to come work with me if they needed help rather than personal invitations).
• Helping students in a live session environment (instead of on the phone) is much more effective in the art classroom because I can employ visuals like my document camera or slides when working with them.
• The switch has encouraged me to make intervention lessons and target the students whose quiz and project scores are low.

Cons:

• Attendance for traditional live lessons is down quite a bit even though the lessons are still offered to students. I'm not sure if students feel like they need a structured lesson but I miss the community I feel it created.
• The switch to live sessions as a main form of help doesn't seem to have caught on completely with students yet so I suspect not all students are attending when they need help

As the year goes on I'm sure I will learn the most effective ways to use this new arrangement to help students and hope to increase achievement and engagement.