distance learning Archives

Leading in a Crisis: Spotlight Our School Partners During School Reopening

April 30, 2021/0 Comments/in Leadership, National Charter School Content/by edtecwp

April 28, 2021

As school reopening continues to be a main topic of conversation and debate across communities nationwide, school leaders face the challenges of determining when students will return and what a typical school day will look like. Re-opening hasn’t been uniform across the country, and the guidelines and strategies vary by state (EducationWeek). Some states have implemented thresholds that must be met for in-person learning to resume, while others have left the re-opening decisions to local school districts.

EdTec supports charter schools across seven states. Although re-opening looks different everywhere, there is a common theme amongst our school partners of continuing learning in a safe, fun, and engaging way for all students. Read on for a few highlights of all the great work happening in classrooms across the country.

California

Before re-opening, schools in California must first meet critical thresholds in health metrics. The California Department of Education launched the California Safe Schools for All Hub to consolidate key resources and provide support and guidance for reopening. continues to update reopening guidance. For parents and students who are not comfortable returning to the classroom for in-person instruction, distance learning is still an option. Check out how our school partners are adapting:

Heartwood Charter School – Schools tours are back! Heartwood Charter School is now offering limited in-person on-campus school tours for prospective families.

The Academies – The Academies Charter Management Organization has welcomed students back on campus and is prioritizing safety and learning in the classroom.

Sunrise Middle School – Sunrise Middle School is now offering their after-school program for 5th and 6th graders with fun activities such as gardening, cooking, art, and sports!

Para Los Niños – Virtual events are still bound to draw a much larger crowd and are more accessible for families, so Para Los Niños plans to host a big virtual party to celebrate the accomplishments and perseverance shown over this incredibly difficult year!

High Tech LA – A picture is worth a thousand words! The seniors at High Tech LA were welcomed back to campus for their senior portraits. They also received their senior sweatshirts and swag.

Grimmway Academy – The Grimmway Academy students celebrated their return with fun activities as a part of their EGG-stravaganza!

Everest Value – The staff at Everest Value School are excited to see students in the classroom again as they transition from distance learning to a hybrid model in the upcoming weeks.

East Bay Innovation – The students at East Bay Innovation came back to campus a little taller and with new haircuts! The administration at East Bay Innovation welcomed students with fun, collaborative, in-person activities.

Aspire – Aspire is providing critical support by offering in-person instruction for their most vulnerable students.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Georgia

The Georgia Department of Education, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Public Health, has developed guidance to support districts and communities in determining their plans and strategies for reopening schools. Georgia’s Path to Recovery for K-12 Schools provides considerations, recommendations, and best practices for reopening, and is designed to help districts prioritize the health and safety of students and teachers. This guidance is not mandated, or state required. Local school districts have the authority and flexibility to meet their individual needs and be responsive to their communities. See how our school partner in Georgia is tackling re-opening:

Ethos Classical – Our school partner, Ethos Classical Charter School, is currently operating with their scholars onsite or on a virtual basis based on family choice.

Louisiana

Individual school districts can decide when to re-open for in-person learning, although the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education adopted minimum health and safety standards for reopening. The Louisiana Department of Education put together a resource guide that includes health guidelines, best practices for reopening, templates, and a reopening checklist.

Élan Academy – Teachers are essential workers! The teachers are more appreciated than ever for their hard work throughout the pandemic. They have shown up for their scholars and are being vaccinated for a safe return to the classroom.

Nevada

In February, Governor Sisolak signed an emergency directive to ensure all students had safe and equitable access to in-person learning, whether full- or part time. The Nevada Department of Education also requires schools to develop distance learning plans.

Nevada Rise – Effective April 5, Nevada Rise began operating with a hybrid model, offering both in-person and online instruction. School leadership prepared a helpful FAQ sheet for parents to help families prepare for the transition. Staff was excited to welcome students back to campus with signs and balloon!

New Mexico

The New Mexico Public Education Department’s Reentry Guidance provides requirements, recommendations, and best practices for reopening. Local district and charter school leaders have the authority to decide to keep schools closed. Discover how our school partners are re-opening:

Solare Collegiate – With scholars back on-campus, Solare Collegiate is prioritizing safety and learning in the classroom while making learning fun and engaging for all students. For example, they hosted a cooking activity where students could participate either in-person or online.

Altura Prep – Altura Prep is taking advantage of being back in person as an opportunity to live up to their core values and give back to the community!

1 2

New York

In New York, all K-12 schools can remain open for in-person learning as long as the in-school positivity rate is lower than 9%. The decisions to open or close schools are made by local school district officials. The New York State Department of Education has published extensive school reopening resources to help guide schools as they plan for a return, including requirements and best practices. See how our school partners in New York are embracing re-opening:

Creo College Prep – The teachers at Creo College Prep are introducing mindfulness into the classroom through yoga practices!

Valence College Prep – The show must go on! Although in-person learning has resumed, Valence College Prep continues to offer a balance of in-person and virtual events. The students kept the performing arts alive from a distance by hosting a virtual musical performance.

Brooklyn RISE – Brooklyn RISE is bringing the school spirit back to campus! What better way to celebrate the return to in-person learning than a spring spirit week.

1 2 3

Tennessee

In Tennessee, school districts can decide whether to open school buildings based on guidance from the Tennessee Department of Education to assess the risk if it is safe to re-open. Our school partners in Tennessee have embraced a mix of in-person and hybrid instruction:

Grizzlies Prep – The students at Grizzlies Prep are back in the classroom, with school administrators emphasizing safety and learning.

Memphis Merit – Who doesn’t love a friendly competition? To celebrate being back on-campus, Memphis Merit hosted a Teachers vs. Scholars basketball game!

Rocketship – Rocketship has also resumed in-person learning, with their schools in Tennessee fully transitioned back into the classroom.

STRIVE Collegiate – STRIVE Collegiate is now embracing a hybrid model in which a percentage of students will remain virtual, and another percentage will return in person. They are also offering an in-person physical education program to give their students a physical outlet to excel in life.

Susie King Taylor Community School – The first-grade class at Susie King Taylor Charter School kicked off the spring with a fun science and engineering project that asked, Can your Peep float on your boat?

1 2 3 4 5

As some form of normalcy returns to our school communities, re-opening strategies must follow applicable guidelines to ensure a safe and successful learning experience for all students. How is your school handling reopening? What has been the biggest challenge? Is there something that worked well for your school community that you would like to share with other schools? Let us know in the comments!

Ongoing Performance Monitoring to Drive Gains in Student Achievement

November 23, 2020/0 Comments/in Data Management for Charter Schools/by edtecwp

By Annice Weinstein, Senior Manager, Assessment Data & Analysis

November 2020

EdTec’s charter school data and assessment experts support school leaders in developing plans to monitor progress on identified measurable outcomes, and schools that follow a defined process have shown considerable gains in student performance.

Amid all the uncertainty and unexpected changes this school year, it is important not to lose sight of your charter goals for academic achievement and student success, particularly given the current political climate. With some forward planning, you can keep your school on target by defining your measurable outcomes, monitoring progress, and regularly sharing results with your school community throughout the year to reinforce common goals.

Identify Key Measurable Outcomes

The first step is to identify the primary measurable outcomes for your school. This should include key statewide accountability measures such as state tests, English learner progress, chronic absenteeism, suspension rates, and graduation rates. For academic achievement, consider including measures that can be evaluated throughout the year as well, such as performance on common benchmarks or normed assessments, or measures of course performance like the percentage of students with passing grades in all core courses. Make sure to include measures that are representative of the unique qualities of your charter. For example, set college application/acceptance rates or post-secondary outcomes as a measure for a college preparatory charter, or student survey results if social-emotional growth and a positive school climate are a focus. And remember to engage your stakeholders – teachers, administrators, parents, students – to determine the best measures of success for your students.

Edtec helps charters prepare their student outcome data for presentation at stakeholder engagement meetings.

Create a Cycle of Data Inquiry

Once your team has identified the key measures for your school, start to map out your calendar of when the data will be available and your schedule of reviewing progress with your stakeholders. The level of analysis will vary depending on the group but do your best to present the same measures to all stakeholder groups. For example, your teachers may take a deep dive into NWEA MAP performance, overall and by strand, for their whole class, groups of students and individual students. For your parents, it may be sufficient to let them know the MAP subjects tested and how students schoolwide are progressing towards an annual target. The frequency of review will also depend on the data type. Chronic absenteeism could be monitored monthly, grades by semester, benchmark tests after each administration, and graduation rates annually. Determine what measures make sense to share at different points throughout the year.

Define the Data Collection Process

The most complicated part of the process will be determining how you will collect data on key performance measures in a way that allows for a streamlined analysis. For some measures, it’s a matter of tasking a staff member to extract data from your existing systems on a regular basis, such as downloading a state test data file from its reporting system or aggregating attendance data from your student information system (SIS). For custom measures, it helps to house the data in a single online reporting system, such as Otus or Illuminate DnA. If you plan to collect information from each individual teacher, establish templates for data collection to make it easier to aggregate scores across classes.

Using an assessment and learning management system such as Otus can help to streamline the data collection and reporting process.

Plan for Streamlined Reporting

Finally, think about how you plan to report the information. For example, if you want to know how many of your students are reading at or above grade level by the end of the year, do not just collect students’ raw scores on their reading assessments. Include a field in your template that translates the raw score to a proficiency score of Below Grade Level, Approaching Grade Level, or At or Above Grade Level, so you can easily see how many students are At or Above Grade Level. If you select NWEA MAP performance, it makes more sense to track progress towards a student’s growth target than it does to track whether the student is on grade level, since the system reports focus more on growth than grade level equivalents.

No matter what measures you select, make sure you can also disaggregate the data by significant student subgroups. This is easier to do if you store the data in a system such as Otus or Illuminate DnA, but this analysis can be done manually as well as long as all the data sources include a unique student identifier, such as the SIS student ID or state student ID. Performance of student subgroups can be a key factor in charter renewal decisions, and many charters excel in supporting historically disadvantaged student groups, so it’s good to stay on top of your progress.

EdTec’s data and assessment experts provide NWEA analysis services, Illuminate DnA implementation and customization support, as well as setup and licensing for the Otus Data, Assessment, and Learning Management solution at a low per-student cost. Additionally, we help charters to plan for stakeholder engagement meetings and to present outcome data to stakeholders, authorizers, and the community. Through EdTec’s new partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse®, we offer the StudentTracker® service to charter schools bundled with our robust, charter-specific data services.

If you’re interested in learning more about how we can support your school in these areas, reach out to us at assessment@edtec.com.

Otus logo and images are the property of Otus, LLC and reproduced with permission.

Four Ways School Leaders Can Promote Equity-Driven Distance Learning

September 4, 2020/0 Comments/in Leadership, National Charter School Content, School Operations/by edtecwp

September 4, 2020

Equity is a driving force for charter schools in their quest to provide high-quality education options for all students, regardless of zip code. The COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures have created new challenges in this quest. As we learned this past spring, low-income students are at a greater disadvantage due to disparities in access to infrastructure needed for distance learning. Many schools across the country are starting the new year with either distance or hybrid learning, putting pressure on school leaders to determine how their school will continue to provide equitable learning opportunities for all students and families.

We’ve been following what charter schools are doing in this area and put together a list of suggestions for how school leaders can practice equity-based distance learning in the upcoming school year.

1. Check-in on Students and Families to Ensure Needs are Being Met

The students who are most in need are less likely to have access to a conducive learning environment, technological devices, internet connectivity, and parental supervision. Schools can play a role in helping to connect families to organizations that provide access to technological devices and internet service for reduced or no cost. You might want to check your state department of education’s website for a list of local companies providing discounts. For example, the California Department of Education shares information about special offers by various internet providers across the state. Common Sense Education also shares information about organizations helping to facilitate access to low-cost and free internet service, devices, and educational content.

Schools can also provide families with information about community organizations that can help to meet basic needs such as food, shelter, and childcare. For example, schools can create a list of community resources with instructions on how to initiate contact and make the list easily accessible to all families by sharing it in newsletters and posting it on their website. Alpha Public Schools created a microsite Alpha Family Resources Hub to provide families with information about resources related to distance learning, housing, food, and more.

2. Prioritize Staying Connected with Students to Support Academic Success and Mental Wellness

During distance learning, regular live interaction between teachers and students is important to maintain connection and encourage stronger learning outcomes School leaders are tasked with overseeing the quality of communication between students and teachers while ensuring check-ins are done regularly with different modes of communication such as text, phone, video, small groups, and social media. Maintaining a consistent, open, two-way communication between your school and students and families will allow insight into how students are adjusting to the new learning environment and coping with other issues.

School leaders can create a space for informal and formal conversations with students by implementing virtual advisory groups or individual online meetings. For example, Memphis Merit Academy created a hotline for parents and students to call for help with schoolwork, LifeWork Hotline | Virtual Teacher, to support students’ academic success. A similar model could work to connect students to counselors to support students’ mental health and wellbeing and help students cope with the stresses brought about by the pandemic. School leaders may also call upon social and mental health services by directing families to their teletherapy services while emphasizing mindfulness, playtime, and exercise to help parents and guardians structure time at home.

3. Provide Flexibility That is Responsive to Students’ Unique Needs and Abilities

It’s important to consider students’ unique needs and experiences when planning your school’s distance learning strategy for the 2020-2021 school year. School leaders might consider distributing surveys that solicit student and family feedback on digital learning experiences as well as their home environments. This feedback will make you aware of any barriers to learning such as access to technology, home language, caretaking responsibilities and/or the presence of caregivers, and can help to inform your distance learning strategy and tailor your approach to serve different groups of students. For example, the survey results can help to identify which students have familial obligations during the day and need access to asynchronous instruction, as well as those who require synchronous instruction to keep them engaged and on track.

A survey can also help improve family and student engagement. For example, at the start of distance learning and after noticing that only a few students were engaged in daily learning, Rocketship Public Schools surveyed their families each morning to inquire what students needed to learn at home and worked to address those needs throughout the day. By the end of the school year, nearly every student was engaging in daily learning.

4. Focus on Mitigating Learning Loss

A recent study by NWEA predicts that students will experience a learning loss of 30 percent in reading and 50 percent in math due to school closures related to the COVID-19 crisis. To help mitigate potential learning loss, school leaders can focus on strategies that accelerate student learning. Accelerated learning strategies require that students consistently receive grade-level materials, tasks, and assignments while making the work accessible. This Learning Acceleration Guide might be a helpful starting point for planning your strategy. To make up for the learning loss, the accelerated student learning plan should start as soon as possible, and ideally should be put together by a diverse team of teachers, administrators, and school leaders in a series of planning sessions. It is helpful to plan several instructional delivery scenarios and have a high-level plan for each scenario. You’ll also want to identify what unfinished learning needs to be addressed, and when and how. This document from Achieve the Core helps educators identify instructional content priorities in math and ELA in order to stay on grade level while addressing related prerequisite skills.

School leaders across the country are tasked with the challenge of developing strategies that maximize equity outcomes and address the diverse needs of their students during this unprecedented time of school closures. Equity-based distance learning helps to ensure that the most vulnerable students are supported during and beyond the pandemic. The resources cited here can help school leaders to implement school policies and processes that support equitable learning outcomes, as well as to train teachers to diagnose unfinished learning while providing acceleration support to the students most in need. What is your school doing to achieve equity in distance learning? Let us know in the comment section below!

Tracking student engagement and enrollment during distance learning

Tracking Attendance and Engagement During Distance Learning

April 30, 2021/0 Comments/in COVID-19 Resources, Data Management for Charter Schools, National Charter School Content/by edtecwp

By the EdTec Data Team

August 18, 2020

This past spring, many schools learned that tracking student attendance and engagement during distance learning can be a complicated and often messy process. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be! There are many ways to track attendance and engagement in this new learning environment, and you’ll be in better shape if you clearly define which methods your school will use from the start. Accurate data is not only necessary for reporting purposes, it will also help your school to identify students who are not engaging and risk falling behind. We’ve put together a few tips to help schools get a plan in place to track student attendance and engagement this school year.

#1 Continue to take attendance on a daily basis

Most schools need to collect daily attendance to provide evidence of whether a student is present or absent to fulfill state, district, and/or other reporting requirements. This data is also important so that school leaders and teachers have an accurate picture of which students are participating in distance learning and which are not. This data can be used to inform optimal resource allocation and determine the appropriate interventions and supports for those students who need it most.

#2 Develop a consistent process for taking attendance that can be applied across learning models

Schools will likely switch between different instructional models during the 2020-2021 school year, so there should be processes and systems that allow for a seamless transition in attendance recording. To minimize confusion, consider setting up a daily Advisory or Homeroom class that can be used for taking attendance both when the school is offering fully remote instruction and when the school is ready to transition to a hybrid model.

#3 Have a system in place for tracking in-person attendance versus virtual attendance

Even if your school intends to or has already reopened with fully remote learning, plan to have separate codes in place if, and when, the school returns to some form of in-person instruction. Given the vastly different nature of remote learning, the ability to distinguish between and report on the two types of attendance will help schools identify students who may require additional resources and support. Keeping your attendance system as clear as possible will help ease any confusion when in-person instruction resumes.

#4 Rely on multiple sources of information to document and verify student engagement

While the guidance on what qualifies as sufficient documentation of student engagement varies across districts and is evolving, schools should keep track of and be able to demonstrate how students and teachers are being held accountable to one another.

Some sources might include:

Gradebook assignments and assignment scores
Log in records and log in duration from learning platforms or student portals
Daily logs (electronic or paper) that can be saved or stored in a student’s file
Online polls or chat history
Attendee logs from video or audio calls

If your school uses PowerSchool or Aeries as a student information system, you can reach out to our school data experts for ideas about how to prepare your system for the new school year.

–

Having a clear plan in place to monitor student attendance and engagement will help your school to collect accurate data for reporting as well as determine which students may need additional support to keep them engaged and learning. How is your school tracking student attendance and engagement? Let us know in the comment section below!