How to Thrive, Not Just Survive Online Intervention
In March of this year, educators, interventionists, & SLPs everywhere found themselves transitioning their in-person instruction to online instruction overnight.
First of all, congratulations on getting to the end of the school year, and thank you for all that you did for these students.
In record time, teachers built Google Classrooms, interventionists became Zoom experts, SLPs created online materials, and students everywhere learned to adapt.
Over the last three months, we have heard and seen so many conversations that expressed, “Let’s just survive until this summer.”
“…Let’s just get to this summer and then we can take a break.”
“…Let’s just get to this summer and students will be done with online school.”
“…Let’s just get to this summer and hopefully, things will go back to normal.”
Now, summer is here and we are seeing that online instruction is becoming more and more “normal.” Schools are saying that they will continue online instruction or hybrid instruction through the fall. The reality is that we don’t know what the future will bring when it comes to school & intervention as we know it.
While this change can be scary, we want you to know that if you can lean into that discomfort, you can THRIVE in online intervention - not just “survive until this summer.” Keep reading for our top tips for thriving in the online setting, or, skip the reading and jump to the video at the bottom.
How to Thrive in Online Intervention - Not Just Survive.
The first thing that we need to do is shift our mindset.
Yes, the ability to connect with a student, in person, is unparalleled and we all miss our students. However, online intervention offers benefits of its own.
We must shift from a “let’s just get through this” mindset to seeing the beauty that online intervention holds.
Hear us out. When we see students in person, we are limited. We are limited geographically since we can only see students within a certain area. We are limited to students who have parents/nannies/someone who can drive them to our sessions (or for us to drive there). We are limited to the materials that we have on hand (and let’s be honest - we have ALL had that day that we forgot a “critical” piece of our lesson and it really threw us off).
With online intervention, many of those limits go away.
We can see students regardless of geographic location. In our practice, we work with students in other states via Zoom. We can reach students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to make it into our office. We have all of our materials accessible electronically, so we have the ability to access them at any point during the lesson.
This brings us to our next point…
Have Digitally Compatible reading intervention Materials
To thrive in this setting, we highly recommend making sure that you have digitally compatible materials.
When we see our students, we have their lessons loaded into a Google folder that is shared with their parents. They can move pieces around during our phonological awareness activities or games, they can mark their words, and type their spelling words and sentences directly onto the screen. When they complete their homework, it automatically updates in our version from their Google folder. (Hooray for no more emailing PDFs, having the students print it & fill it out, having the family send it back, and then having to decipher the scanned-in handwriting).
These digitally compatible lessons allow students to remain engaged and reduce the “back-and-forth” sharing of resources. If you don’t have digitally compatible resources, you can absolutely still see students online but making this transition has been a game-changer for us and we highly recommend it.
Get Organized
We are suckers for organization tips & tricks in our office. While this is a recommended skill for in-person lessons as well, it has been especially helpful now that we are online. Here’s how we organize our 1:1 students.
Create a Google Folder for each student.
Load online materials with them (or PDFs if you don’t have online materials) and share the folder with the student/their parents. You will use this folder to house all of their online materials.
Create a “data-tracking” binder. We create a binder with tabs for each of our students. This way, we can house any of their print materials & data tracking sheets. When we see any given student, we can check their datasheet from the week before, see exactly which lesson we left off at, pull up the online version, and have our entire lesson prepped in less than 5 minutes.
You can check out the video, below, for more information and see the process that we use!
Then, for more information about top-notch intervention, join us for our FREE workshop: How to Create Systematic, SOR-Aligned Lesson Plans. This workshop will help you determine what actually needs to be included in a Science of Reading-based lesson, how to build a lesson plan based on the Science of Reading, and how to optimize your lesson plans. Plus, we’ll share our lesson planning guides!