Strategies from the Classroom: Making Online Learning Successful

While I used to teach live in person on campus at Chartwell, I now teach remotely via Zoom, so my classroom looks a bit different than most.  I currently teach only high school students.  There are many successful strategies I use in my Zoom room but with high school students, I find the single most important one is building a positive and trusting relationship.  It’s really important to allow my students to vent and be heard, to show them that you understand them and can relate to their feelings and words.  In my opinion, this positive rapport is very effective for teaching a structured literacy program to older students online.

Once I have established a good rapport I can start the intensive reading instruction.  In my Zoom room, there is constant interactive engagement from the time I start my lesson plan to the time I finish.  To help with students’ executive functioning skills, I use a visual lesson plan checklist.  At the beginning of class, I present the visual lesson plan checklist and tell the students the goal is to complete parts 1-5 of the lesson plan.  After the completion of each part, I check off the box.  This can be done in the classroom setting as well, you might even want to laminate and make a copy for each student so they can practice this valuable life skill of creating a list and checking off the boxes to complete it.  I use checklists all the time in my adult life!

An effective strategy I use is the “I do it, you do it, we do it” method.  This means I am constantly modeling each skill or strategy I am teaching. If I want the student to do something, I do it first.  For example, if I want students to underline base words and circle prefixes and suffixes using the annotation tool on Zoom, I always complete the task first.  If I want students to scoop sentences to practice fluency, I scoop at least 1-2 sentences first and read them out loud.

When I want students to have more practice in single word reading I use my literacy program’s online tool, Wilson Language Training, and build words using the sounds cards or syllable cards.  To practice spelling, I give students control of my screen and have them build words using the sound or syllable cards.  

Although you might ask yourself, how can a structured literacy program be taught effectively via Zoom? I can tell you that everything I can do in the classroom I can do via Zoom! 

Watch Genee use online structured literacy tools in action using the link below. 

https://vimeo.com/923399903?share=copy 

Genee Cahill is a former Massachusetts resident. She worked as a special education teacher at the New England Center for Children prior to relocating to California.  She started teaching structured literacy at Chartwell School in 2017 and soon became a certified Wilson Dyslexia Practitioner.  She primarily teaches advanced structured literacy concepts to high school students and has taught many young adults how to become successful readers.