This guide, which can be easily adapted for your school, includes a run down of what will be similar and different from spring to fall distance learning modes, sample schedules, behavior norms and grading policies, tips for how parents can support their children while distance learning, and a directory of staff who can help with Distance Learning issues -- all in four pages! Once customized for your context, it will be a useful starting point and reference document for staff and families alike. 

This document, designed for department planning meetings, is meant to generate ideas about what students will need to combat summer learning loss, what you as an educator will need, and how to creatively meet those needs. Together, your team will consider: 

• Social Emotional Support for Students - How can we diagnose where students are and build more social-emotional work into the first quarter of the year?
• Community Building - How can we strengthen community in Quarter 1?
• Supporting Students’ Non-Cognitive Skill Growth - We’re going to continue asking students to be more independent. In what ways do we need to be coaches, and how do we plan for that?
• Curriculum - How can we plan for a curriculum that may need to shift, considering what instruction was missed in Q4 and that we may need to teach remotely again?

Gateway High faculty have assembled an impressive array of activities in all disciplines for students to take on during the summer. As they are ungraded and optional, all are designed to be relevant to students’ lives, maximize student choice, and be fun! It’s a great opportunity to go-in depth into topics constrained by the typical school schedule or that aren’t quite covered by state standards. And while it’s true most students probably have literally nothing better to do, the deal is made sweeter by a prize raffle: completed projects earn entries into two different raffles for teen-friendly gift cards. 

Even if your school doesn’t have an official advisory structure in place, you may find it useful to incorporate informal meetings with students so kids can catch up on each other’s lives and loosen up a bit. Gateway High School physics teacher Tim Woolgar and colleagues have compiled tips, resources and links to make these meetings fun and useful. This document includes a wealth of links to party games appropriate for middle and high schoolers, along with suggestions about how best to adapt them for a Zoom meeting or video chat of your choice.

Gateway educators have compiled this quick tip sheet to help students understand how to reach out to teachers appropriately and effectively, going over the basics of business email and video chat etiquette, and even providing a sample email students can use to help them organize their thoughts when they need assistance. 

This activity is best done in a fairly large group (at Gateway, it was an all-faculty meeting), and will take a little bit of advance preparation: you’ll need to set up several dummy accounts on Google Classroom (or whatever learning platform your school is using) and “enroll” them in a standard course load. Small teams of teachers will then “shadow” the student – surveying a day or week as a student would to get a sense of what works well and what is confusing. 

This activity is best done in a fairly large group (at Gateway, it was an all-faculty meeting), and will take a little bit of advance preparation: you’ll need to set up several dummy accounts on Google Classroom (or whatever learning platform your school is using) and “enroll” them in a standard course load. Small teams of teachers will then “shadow” the student – surveying a day or week as a student would to get a sense of what works well and what is confusing. 

You’re working your butt off: rewriting curriculum, making videos, hosting zoom lessons, calling home, answering emails from students at all hours of the day and night. Distance teaching isn’t for the faint of the heart. But it isn’t easy for those tasked with doing the distance learning, either. If you’re finding that your students are struggling or are hard to keep in touch with, this PD exercise may help by inviting you to spend time in your online classrooms from the perspective of a student.

As Zoom has quickly become the video chat client of choice for schools and businesses around the world, it has also become the canvas of choice for internet trolls to express themselves. These sophisticated folks have even garnered a few headlines for gatecrashing Zoom meetings and spamming them with distracting or inappropriate photos, or otherwise making a scene and derailing the class or meeting. But never fear! Following a few simple best practices will allow you and your students to take full advantage of Zoom’s features while preventing you from being Rick Rolled.  

The guide includes scripts for how to make these conversations productive over a brief period of time, suggestions for helping students navigate common stumbling blocks, how to spot if a student needs referral to an actual counselor,  and an email template for parents who may need help keeping an eye on student performance. The Word Doc version is completely customizable, allowing you to fill in details that are particular to your school.