This year, Read to Lead collaborated with the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy’s faculty and students to launch a new learning game series called Community Pharmacy. In Community Pharmacy, middle school students have the opportunity to play the role of the Head Pharmacist, leading a diverse team that includes a pharmacy technician, a nurse practitioner, a resident researcher, and a student pharmacist. As “the boss,” they must learn to solve everyday challenges in a pharmacy career world, whether it’s re-evaluating a pediatric patient’s asthma prescription or figuring out why a patient with lupus keeps showing up at the ER.

During a Read to Lead pilot session, supported through a grant from the Max and Lorayne Cooper Foundation, fifteen middle school students from Tarrant, Alabama played Community Pharmacy for the first time and shared with us their feedback. For 5th grader Kamden, the online learning game gave him a more in-depth look into a pharmacist’s job and made him consider the choices he might make in the future. He said the most important skills he learned were “how to be a leader and how to say the right things to people.” 6th grader Maleah shared that the experience made her reflect on what it means to make the right decision and learn to take advice from other people. 

The Read to Lead team assessed the impact of the learning game on the students’ SEL skills by having them fill out a survey before and after they played. The results showed that the most significant improvements were in the areas of self-management (such as getting through something even when they feel frustrated) and relationship skills (such as getting along with classmates). Additionally, 93% of students said they felt they had improved both their literacy and social and emotional skills, and 100% said they would recommend Read to Lead to a friend.

“The Community Pharmacy pilot session in Tarrant, Alabama reinforced for us the incredible potential that all of our students have in developing their social and emotional learning skills, in combination with their reading and writing skills,” shared Juliana Hess, Director of Research and Learning Design. “I was thrilled to see that the students immediately took to our newest learning game and were fully engaged and immersed throughout their Read to Lead experience. They also enjoyed making decisions and discussing how their decisions affected other characters within the game.”

While there are many digital tools available that track students’ academic success in real time, Read to Lead is leading the way in evaluating social emotional skills development, which often goes un-assessed. Through an educator’s SEL dashboard, they can see how their students are responding to in-game decisions and self-reflective journaling prompts and differentiate their instruction accordingly. This new feature was made possible through a partnership with Digital Promise and support from the S & L Marx Foundation. As Read to Lead’s learning games expand into new career worlds, social emotional learning and growth will continue to be a core component, ensuring that middle school students have a toolkit of skills to succeed at school and in life. 

The post Inspiring Social and Emotional Learning Findings through Read to Lead’s Newest Learning Game appeared first on Read to Lead.

According to the NCCP, nearly one in five children in the United States show symptoms of a mental health disorder, yet 80% of them will not receive treatment. 

While not a subject that is tested in school, giving students the social-emotional skills and tactics to help them better understand themselves and those around them can positively impact long-term learning and achievement.

To help educators teach Mental Health Awareness Month, we’ve bundled our favorite immersive learning games, activities, and resources that help students develop, recognize, and practice good mental health. 

Click here to download the free bundle!

Week 1: Support students in finding anxiety relief 

Finding outlets for anxiety and stress relief is becoming more and more important in our everyday life, and how we all manage this is different. This week, play learning game Vital Signs: High Anxiety with your students. When students take on the role of the boss in this immersive workday, students are challenged with diagnosing a patient who might be suffering from Anxiety. See the Answer Key here!

Later in the week, spark a discussion with your students to help them identify their feelings, explore strategies to manage anxiety, and make space to uplift each other with our Mental Health Awareness Supplemental lesson Anxiety Relief.

Week 2: Help students identify how to look for helpers

Knowing you’re never alone in life is key to managing mental health. This week play learning game Vital Signs: Diagnosis Unknown! As the director, students will need to work with their team to figure out the mysterious symptoms a patient is experiencing.  Answer Key.

Take it one step deeper and use Look for the Helpers supplemental lesson for students to find reassurance and hope while practicing compassion for the helpers in their communities.

Week 3: Support students in navigating complex decisions

Being able to navigate tough decisions is a muscle that has to be built over time. This week play learning game Community in Crisis: Medical Mystery to help students build that muscle. During this game, the community center team discovers a mold issue at the community housing complex. As the director, students must decide what they should do for the apartment residents while resolving the mold issue. Answer Key.

Later in the week, reinforce the importance of making informed decisions based on multiple forms of information using this supplemental lesson plan, Prioritizing Aid.

Week 4: Develop students’ self-awareness toward a bright future

Knowing your strengths and values is key to making the best decisions for a happy future. This week play learning game Community Pharmacy: Career Crossroads to help students develop their self-awareness. During this game, your student pharmacist is graduating and is torn between two career paths. As the Head Pharmacist, students must decide whether to support their student pharmacist’s decision to follow a new career path or recommend them for the hospital pharmacist job opening. Answer Key.

Later in the week, reinforce the importance of making decisions that will help students explore a future that can bring them happiness and a sense of fulfillment with this discussion and debate guide.

Bonus content: Show students how to manage emergencies

Unfortunately, in life, students will at some point have to manage emergency situations. To help them prepare, play learning game After the Storm: Emergency Management. During this game, the day after a hurricane hits the town, the editor-in-chief needs to decide the best method to get vital news and information out to the community while managing staff who are also dealing with the storm’s effects. Answer Key

Take it one step deeper and reinforce reading comprehension while promoting thoughtful reflection of the decisions made during the immersive work-day with this Discussion Guide. 

Quick tip!

You can now assign the learning games in the Mental Health Awareness Bundle right from the playlist section of your Activities Page Tab on the Read to Lead platform! Assign to your students in one click (yes it really is that easy!) A great activity for morning work, early-finisher activities, or extra credit!

Sign up for a free account to get started

Are you planning on using Read to Lead this month to support mental health awareness and social-emotional learning in your class? Sign up for a free account, and download your free lesson bundle!

The post Teach Mental Health Awareness Month appeared first on Read to Lead.

Check out some of the newer Read to Lead features recently launched to help you reach every student!

Use Auto-Graded Formative Assessments

Formative assessments are key to gauge each student’s understanding of material and their progress over time, but manually issuing them can be a massive time suck. Enter Read to Lead with auto-graded formative assessments built into the platform!

In each Read to Lead learning game, students complete multiple formative assessments and decision prompts while being fully engaged in the interactive virtual workplace. These assessments are auto-graded, allowing you to have a bird’s eye view into students’ performance in real time! It also frees you up so you can go deeper supporting students who need a little extra help. Talk about getting the most out of your time!

Differentiate Instruction Based on Real-Time Feedback

Ever wished your teacher grade book had an “auto-sort” function to quickly and easily assess which students need more guidance with their work? Well now you can!

The Reports on the Read to Lead platform lets you see an overview of class performance or drill down to each individual student. Each student’s progress and performance is recorded in this dashboard, providing insights on each skill (English Language Arts (ELA) skills, but also Social Emotional Learning (SEL) skills) organized by the support level needed. At a glance, you’ll be able to see which areas your students are excelling at, and which areas they may need more practice.

Thinking about introducing additional differentiation in your teaching? The Reports tab also includes the capability to display students’ performance by Reading Standard or Social Emotional Learning Competency. Use these reports to guide how you adapt and scaffold the curriculum in a way that supports the whole-child!

Allow Students to Practice the Skills They Need Most

If you’ve ever wanted to know exactly where your students need more practice, you’re going to love the Auto-Assign feature on the Read to Lead platform! After students play their first Read to Lead learning game, the platform automatically offers a recommendation to the teacher with a list of games a student should play next based on their past performance!

Provide deeper practice on the skills your students need most by simply assigning the games recommended by the platform. Read to Lead’s adaptive technology also modifies assessments based on students’ performance within the platform. Students also get instant feedback on their progress, allowing them to celebrate their wins and motivating them to keep reading!

Best part? Read to Lead is super easy to implement and is 100% free. No tricks or paywalls – just free!  Sign up for free here, and assign students their first learning game!

The post 3 Tips to Simplify Differentiated Learning  appeared first on Read to Lead.

“Amplify student voice” they say. What does that really look like? We’re here to help you engage and motivate students to reach higher levels of achievement. Ready? Let’s dive in. 

Recently, more attention has been placed on elevating student voices in schools, and with good reason. When students feel they have a stake in their education, they become more motivated and engaged, and it’s found that this is often reflected in their academic achievements.

If you’re looking for easy and effective ways to boost student voice in your classroom, we’ve got you covered! Keep reading to learn more about our four favorite ways to boost student voice and keep students engaged!

Use Tools That Allow Students To Go At Their Own Pace

Nothing tells a student that they’re in the driver’s seat of their own education than allowing them to set the pace for their learning. While this may be tricky in a traditional classroom, there are student-friendly tools that make implementing differentiated learning a breeze.

Give students free rein over their pace of learning with Read to Lead games. In this interactive learning platform, students get the freedom to explore, read, and learn within virtual workplaces. Adaptive technology also ensures that each game is catered to each student’s learning needs. As students complete games on the platform, the Auto-Assign feature provides game recommendations to easily assign the next learning game and provide deeper practice on the skills your students need most. The Teacher Dashboard also records students’ progress and performance, providing insights on each skill, organized by the support level needed so you can introduce additional differentiation in your teaching. Differentiated learning has never been so easy, or fun!

Show Students That They Belong In Our Classrooms

Would you speak up in a room you didn’t feel you belong in? Our kids are the same. That’s why showing our students that they belong in our classrooms is critical to empowering and encouraging student voices.

Incorporate culturally relevant teaching in your curriculum with the books you choose as a class, and include educational materials that allow students to see themselves in their learning. Resources to support students’ learning should also showcase diverse and inclusive representation to ensure that no child feels left out. Read to Lead, Flocabulary, and Learning for Justice all offer educational resources that are an excellent addition to any middle school classroom that’s eager to make students feel welcome and elevate student voice.

Bonus: Need ideas for culturally diverse and inclusive reading lists? Check out our recommendations for 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grade!

Ignite Engagement With A Reading Challenge 

A reading challenge is a great way to engage students and boost their confidence by putting them in-charge of their own learning. We’ve found when students feel they have agency, achievement follows. When a student is able to read and learn at their own pace, they will feel more confident in flexing their voice. The Read to Lead Million Words Read Challenge is an easy way to get started. 

Simply sign up for a free educator account on Read to Lead, and get your students on the platform to read and rack up their word count at their own pace. The challenge officially kicks off in January 2022 but words read on the platform during December also count toward the final tally! P.S. When students in your class cumulatively reach one million words read, we’ll reward them with prizes and a celebratory class party! Sign up now to get started!

Survey Students To Find Out What They Want

What better way to boost student voice than to actually give your students… you guessed it, a voice! We often assume we know what our students want or are interested in, but the best people to ask about students’ opinions are the students themselves!

Use a fun survey or polling tool like Kahoot, Plickers, and Socrative to get students’ input in classroom decisions that matter. Whether it’s the music that plays in the background during independent reading time, choosing what book they read for that month, or how they want to showcase their learning, giving students a choice in their education is an easy and effective way to boost student voice in your classroom.

Elevating student voice doesn’t have to be a challenge! Being mindful about putting students front and center learning and including them in the conversation about their education is all it takes. By giving them agency and the opportunity to take ownership of their learning, we will not only be able to boost student voices, but also nurture more engaged learners who perform well in and out of school!

Are you ready to empower the next generation of readers and leaders? Create a free Read to Lead account and watch student achievement soar.

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As part of the educator community, we know how important it is to weave anti-bullying life lessons into instruction so students are prepared to address bullying through effective conflict resolutions, instead of resorting to bullying tactics themselves. Instead of just sharing and reading stories about how others deal with bullies, let’s pumpkin spice things up a little and put your students in the mediator role with a fun activity: playing Read to Lead’s immersive learning games!

Check out our FREE Anti-Bullying Mediator Bundle filled with learning games, lessons, debates, and projects you can use with your class to teach students how to recognize bullying and how to resolve issues without resorting to bullying tactics. Pick one or do them all. The choice is yours!

Download the Anti-Bullying Mediator Bundle! 

Week 1: Play immersive learning games

Put students in a real-life scenario while they play learning game, Restorative Justice, where they gain literacy and reasoning skills while learning anti-bullying techniques. Or support students to learn the difference between gossip vs. fact and the dangers of bullying while playing Truthteller.

Week 2: Read about Anti-Bullying Month

Give students this reading comprehension lesson that uses informative text to uncover  the essential question “How does declaring October Anti-Bullying Month help reduce bullying?” 

Week 3: Discuss and debate 

Spark deep discussion and reflection with your students with an Anti Bullying Debate question.

 Extra credit: Watch past or upcoming debates on your local news channel and use it as an example of what not to do in preparation for respectful debates in your classroom.

Week 4: Create a Public Service Announcement 

Inspire action within your students. Allow students to create a public service announcement to promote kindness, acceptance, and inclusion.

There you have it! Four weeks of teaching National Bullying Prevention Month and fostering the skills students need express kindness, acceptance, and inclusivity.

The post Teach Kindness for Bullying Prevention Month appeared first on Read to Lead.

What do our middle school readers need right now?

We want our 5-9 grade students to become flexible, resilient readers who read for pleasure as well as for academic purposes. At the same time, we want our students to be empathetic, curious, and confident leaders. A student who can read confidently, comprehend fully, and write clearly opens doors to worlds of discovery in science, literature, math, and history. But a student who can do all those things and can practice self-management, empathy, and make complex decisions — that’s the student that’s fully prepared for life after school. 

How can we best meet those needs?

With just 15-minutes a day of consistent skills-based learning, students will begin to build muscle — and not the kind you build in the gym! After all, why do we call it a Literacy Blitz? Its 15 intensive minutes of immersive game-play where your students will experience high engagement, rigorous standards-aligned content, and unparalleled achievement. In fact, after playing four Read to Lead reading games, students build the foundation to outperform reading expectations by 60%.

Why are our Literacy Blitz Bundles so effective?

The simplicity and predictability of the bundle frees the teacher from constant choreographing so that they have time to observe, to listen, to assess, and to teach into specific student needs. With a real-time student insights dashboard, teachers are able to know where each student stands and how to differentiate teaching.

How can you get started?

Easy, grab your free bundle, and sign up for a free Read to Lead account. 

Now… more about each bundle!

We’re focusing on the three skills our middle school students need to master most. While there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all classroom, so you can choose one or teach them all. The choice is yours! Each bundle is jam-packed with immersive learning games, activities, discussion prompts and more.

   Reading Comprehension

   Vocabulary Acquisition

   Social Emotional Learning 

Reading Comprehension Bundle: Analyze and Compare Texts

Reading Comprehension is when students are demonstrating a level of understanding of a text. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text. 

In this bundle, we specifically tackle and achieve your classroom learning goals focused around the CCRA.R. 9 standard. Let your students dig deep by practicing analyzing and comparing multiple texts during their work day when they take on the role of the ‘boss’ at a community center.

 Get the bundle! 

Vocabulary Acquisition Bundle: Practice interpreting words and phrases

Vocabulary acquisition word knowledge is often linked to academic success. Students who possess large vocabularies can express their ideas better and understand new concepts more quickly than students with limited vocabularies. 

In this bundle, you’ll focus on anchor standard CCRA.R.4 to nurture and reinforce students’ vocabulary skill development. Students will play immersive learning games and participate in activities specifically designed to contain texts where students flex this skill when selecting words or phrases that suit a specific context or message. Bonus: Since students are deep in an immersive day at work, the experience is centered on real-world application and will even introduce industry-specific vocabulary. 

Get the bundle! 

Social Emotional Learning Bundle: Practice self-management skills

Everyday students endure various levels of stress and change, prompting the ongoing need to find programs and curriculum that helps them identify and manage their emotions. Building from the foundation of self-awareness, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines self-management as, “the ability to successfully regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in different situations.

While Read to Lead covers many SEL competencies, in this bundle we’ll focus on students’ practicing self-management. Support students as they navigate their own complex emotions, learn healthy ways to manage stress and develop the agency needed to advocate for themselves. Encourage students when they play these learning games to set goals that are personally meaningful and define a plan to achieve them.

And that’s a wrap – three core bundles to help you streamline lesson planning and jump-start literacy skill-building this school year! 

The post Literacy Skills Bundle for Middle School appeared first on Read to Lead.

Going back to school for a fresh new year brings with it a ton of anticipation and excitement, but teachers are also worried about the COVID learning loss that our students may have experienced. And we’re not necessarily talking about traditional learning. 

While getting kids back on track with standards-based skills is important, it’s also critical to recognize that our students missed out on more than just reading, writing, math, and science. Our students missed out on in-person social interactions with peers, celebrating achievements as a class, and setting daily routines.

At Read to Lead, we’re all about whole-child development – that’s why we’ve put together three recommendations to integrate social emotional learning (SEL) into your middle school classroom!

First though, what is social-emotional learning? Social-emotional learning (SEL) is the process of developing the self-awareness, self-control, and interpersonal skills that are vital for school, work, and life success. The CASEL framework tells us that students with strong social-emotional skills are better able to cope with everyday challenges and benefit academically, professionally, and socially. 

So, how can you weave social-emotional learning into your class this year? 

Focus on Building Relationships

Relationships are the foundation of success. For students who have spent the better part of the year behind a screen, forming and maintaining relationships may be something they need to work on. Start the year off strong by allowing students to set goals for themselves, and not just target grades in each subject. Encourage them to set goals for their own personal development, and get them to share it with you and their peers to set that foundation of building relationships with others.

Another way to help students build relationships is to let them help each other with projects or assignments. Introduce more project-based learning, or use the jigsaw technique in your classroom to give students more opportunities to interact and bond with each other. And as a bonus, students will LOVE you for letting them partner up with their buddies to work on tough tasks!

Facilitate Culturally Relevant and Diverse Learning Experiences

What better way to cultivate key SEL skills like social awareness, relationship building, and responsible decision-making than by facilitating culturally relevant and diverse learning experiences in the classroom? Sounds like a challenge? It doesn’t have to be!

Choose novels that feature diverse characters of different backgrounds for students to read and discuss in class – and if you need some ideas, check out our recommendations for 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th grade! Set time aside for student-led discussions about topics they are interested in, and care about – and then encourage them to put their ideas into action in the real world.

Read to Lead’s online learning games are also an excellent addition to your middle school classroom. Students get to lead a diverse team and interact with a variety of characters in unique workplace settings. Each learning game has accompanying discussion questions that can be used for small-group or class activities, and each series offers a culminating project for students to work on as well. All this while having fun AND boosting students’ literacy as they read 5,000 words per game they play!

Adapt as You Go

This new school year won’t be like others. You may find that the usual scope and sequence may not be relevant, or that students are coming in at different levels. Adapting as you go will be key to supporting your students and helping them succeed – and this applies to SEL as well!

What will help in adapting and maintaining a fluid mentality to the year is using tools and resources that will do reporting and insight gathering in real-time so you can have a pulse on where each student stands in their learning. 

Read to Lead, for example, has formative assessments and real-time reporting so you can instantly see how each child is performing and the areas they need a little extra help in. Perhaps Ethan needs a helping hand in critical reading, or Sophia could use some extra practice with communicating clearly. Differentiating learning according to students’ strengths and weaknesses will go a long way addressing the gaps that may have formed in the past few months. Finding the right tools to empower your teaching style will support you in reaching every student. 

Are you ready to nurture the leaders of tomorrow and equip them with the SEL skills they need to succeed? Sign up for free with Read to Lead!

The post 3 SEL Activities for Middle School appeared first on Read to Lead.

In Using Career Exposure to Build Social Emotional Learning, I shared how the Read to Lead team is working to design digital learning games that empower middle school students to build their social emotional (SEL) skills, in combination with their literacy and leadership skills. 

As we look ahead, we’re excited about two opportunities to improve our learning model and have an even greater impact on the teachers and students we serve: (1) adding new features to support SEL skill development and (2) advancing how we measure SEL skills.

Adding Innovative New Features to Support SEL Skill Development

Through Read to Lead, students are making key decisions and demonstrating agency. We want to understand more about: What are the learnings students are taking away and applying to the classroom? Is it changing how they show up to class each day, interact with their peers, and perform academically? Is it changing how they are thinking about themselves? These are the questions we’re addressing and that we’d like to explore in even more depth. 

This is where our partnership with Digital Promise comes in. Digital Promise is a national leader in leveraging learning science to improve student outcomes. Their Learner Variability Project focuses on putting their research on whole child approaches to work for edtech product developers so that every student receives the support they need in academic content areas, their cognitive development, and their social emotional capacities. 

Built on evidence-based strategies, Digital Promise’s Learner Variability Navigator tool has helped us hone in on the learner factors that Read to Lead is most effective in developing. The Read to Lead learner factors we’ve identified include critical literacy, motivation, argumentative reasoning, inference, and social awareness, and relationship skills. 

Through our Digital Promise partnership and with generous support from the S & L Marx Foundation, the Read to Lead team and I are in the process of designing new features and resources to support SEL skill development and strengthen our learning model for middle school students, including:

• Interactive debate tools will help students think critically about why they are making a certain decision, the consequences of that decision, and how to share different perspectives on the same question. 
• Tools to promote goal-setting will encourage students to focus on how they can accumulate the skills they need to reach their goals over time. 
• Project-based learning will guide students to transfer the leadership skills they learn and practice in Read to Lead into their own lives and communities.

Measuring SEL Skill Development

A common challenge within the education community is that SEL can be difficult to measure. Read to Lead puts students in charge and provides opportunities to track decisions made while interacting with peers in realistic career environments, creating unique data sets that can unlock new ways of understanding the development of SEL skills. Using our scenarios, we are eager to explore students’ metacognitive understanding of their decision and how that links to SEL skills. 

To address this need and complement our initiative with Digital Promise, we have begun creating an SEL dashboard, which will provide teachers and students with insight into their development of SEL skills in alignment with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) framework. 

Teachers will have access to actionable, real-time data to help them understand their students’ SEL skill development and differentiate their instruction and support accordingly. In addition, it will enhance students’ ability to monitor their progress on the skills they are practicing and building as “the boss,” ultimately increasing their motivation and self-awareness about their skill set.   

In the months ahead, the Read to Lead team and I look forward to developing new insights into SEL and academic skill development and applying those data-driven insights to product innovation. As we continue to innovate and grow, our goal is to reach teachers at scale with the tools and resources to inspire the whole learners that fill their classrooms! 

Sign up for Read to Lead to bring SEL, literacy, and 21st century skills to your classroom.

Juliana Hess

Director of Research and Evaluation

As the Director of Research & Evaluation, Juliana Hess brings a unique background that combines strategic planning, research, design thinking, and relationship management. Her work at Classroom, Inc. focuses on using applied research methods to amplify the impact of Read to Lead and inform the design of new product creation. She is passionate about learning sciences research, and over the course of her career, she’s led large-scale education projects in NYC and internationally. She holds an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University and a BA with honors from the University of Kansas.

The post Nurturing the Whole Learner through Read to Lead appeared first on Read to Lead.

Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts… whatever the platform, the fatigue is real. Not just for teachers, but for students and their families too. 

Did you know that in April 2020, two trillion minutes were spent on Zoom alone? Two trillion minutes. It comes as no surprise that so many educators are feeling a little fatigued after a full year of virtual teaching.. 

We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but here are our top five tips to help fight Zoom fatigue in your virtual and hybrid classrooms. 

Start each virtual lesson with an SEL check-in question

Being a student in the middle of a pandemic, learning remotely, with little or no social interaction isn’t easy. . 

Starting each virtual lesson with a check-in question can help take the pulse of how your students are doing. This is especially important when we can’t be in the same room as them to read their body language or observe their interactions with their peers.

Allow students to name the emotion they are bringing to class. This helps students know how they and their classmates are feeling, what different emotions look like, and how to better interact with their peers based on how they’re feeling. This check-in can also help cultivate social connections between students, which is crucial for learning.

Use Zoom’s breakout rooms for deeper discussion

Do you love talking to a screen with 25 faces (or black boxes) looking back at you? If you don’t, your students definitely have it worse. The truth is, participating in discussions can be intimidating for students, and even more so in a large virtual group. One of the things we’re hearing from our teacher community is that smaller breakout sessions are sparking deeper conversations and reflections for students.

Zoom’s breakout rooms offer a quick fix to engage students in small group conversations, just like they would in the classroom. Small group discussions are also better at promoting critical thinking and increasing student satisfaction. Using breakout rooms in tandem with whole group instruction can be an effective way to avoid Zoom fatigue by changing things up once in a while.

Encourage students to have a designated space for learning

While not every student may have access to their own “virtual classroom” space (although we are loving the creative parents out there who have the financial ability to make this happen), there are norms that can be established in almost all scenarios. 

It’s tough having to sit through a lesson (much less with your bed 3 feet away), which is why having a designated place for learning is critical. Just like in a regular classroom, encouraging students to find a space that works for them and use it consistently can help reduce distractions and enable them to focus on learning.

Create a consistent lesson format 

When everything feels like it’s up in the air, consistency is key! Children are creatures of routine, and school shifting to virtual platforms has removed a lot of that consistency that comes with having a fixed daily schedule.

Students have said they missed having a routine, and the feeling of “not knowing” creates additional stress for them. Having a consistent lesson format for all classes can reduce some of the fatigue students may be experiencing. Setting virtual classroom routines for students also creates clear expectations and guides students to identify and recognize the beginning, middle, and end of a lesson.

Having live interaction with students at the beginning and end is a handy way to “sandwich” content, and ensure students have a chance to connect with you and each other. Working in elements of both synchronous and asynchronous learning is also helpful, as does setting regular office hours for students who need additional help.

Spark engagement in new ways

Sparking student engagement when you’re in the classroom all together is a challenge – nevermind when you’re virtual. Game-based learning assignments that can be completed either asynchronously or synchronously can be a great way to spark student interest. Read to Lead provides just that. 

Choose from a library of literacy games that you can filter by class objective and grade level, easily assign to your class and check student progress in real-time! Perfect for teaching from afar. What’s more – Read to Lead games are fully aligned with Common Core Standards and rich with culturally relevant content, keeping students deeply engaged in learning!

Sign up for a free account here and watch student engagement climb!

Tell us your best tip to combat Zoom fatigue in the comments below. Want more tips like these? Get in on the conversation by joining the Read to Lead Educator Facebook Group.

The post 5 Tips to Combat Zoom Fatigue in Your Virtual Classroom appeared first on Read to Lead.

As educators, we can help students explore options before they have to start deciding on diploma paths. We can help them increase awareness in their self-discovery and education. 

National Careers Week is March 1 – 6th this year, and we’re here to help you boost career readiness for your students. Here’s what to do with your class!

Monday

Engage students in an immersive work-day experience. 

Engage students in deep career exploration and social-emotional learning experiences through immersive gameplay with the Community in Crisis learning game. 

You’ll want to create a free Read to Lead account if you don’t already have one! See the lesson plan here.

Students take on the role of the “boss” as they read closely, think critically, lead a diverse team, and solve complex problems — all within the immersive context of a day at work. 

Play Community in Crisis game 12: Come Together

Answer key

Tuesday

Engage students in healthy debate.

Practice skills like listening, speaking clearly, and being respectful of all opinions by hosting a debate based on yesterday’s immersive work-day. 

Use this debate guide to center the discussion!

Tech Tip: You can post the debate in Google Classroom and allow students to comment on each other’s responses using conversation starters!

Wednesday

Give students a front-row seat into career exploration.

Grab the popcorn and watch an on-demand Read to Lead: Live! session where students will get an inside look into the leadership journey of passionate professionals around the country and learn about different careers across multiple disciplines and industries. 

If you thought the on-demand session was powerful, you have to catch a LIVE session! Sign up for the next one on March 12th here!

Thursday

Spark deep class discussion.

Read to Lead: Live! always seems to spark deep questions and reflections for students about their passions, desires, challenges, and future. 

Use this discussion guide to spark deep discussion and reflection with your students!

Friday

Connect literacy to career readiness.

We know reading unlocks all other learning. Since your students have already played one Read to Lead game, each student has read 5K words!

Help students reach one million words read by joining the Million Words Read Challenge. 

When your class reaches Millionaire status (collectively), we send you student prize packs and a gift card to celebrate this achievement with your class!

Check the leaderboard to see where your class stands!

And that’s a wrap! We hope your students leave this week feeling inspired, encouraged, and most of all confident in what’s next in their self-discovery and career journey.

The post Celebrate National Careers Week with Read to Lead appeared first on Read to Lead.