SPED in the Time of Coronavirus - Part 2
Part 2. Instruct to Engage & Motivate
Engaging and motivating special education students is a challenge in a brick-and-mortar classroom. Special education students are often distracted by other students, frustrated by the quantity and demands of content or overwhelmed by the pace of instruction. All of these things can interfere with student engagement and motivation. Trying to keeps teens engaged in distance learning can include all of these and more since the teacher cannot be physically present to observe, and then, redirect, prompt or modify appropriately. This is where teachers need to get creative to keep students on task.
The first approach I have used to keep students engaged is to make the learning seem like fun, even for high school students. Technology and the web can help teachers wrap their lessons in novel activities that engage students to at least try it before they realize they are actually doing class work. Here are some ideas:
Schedule a group Zoom (audio only or live stream video too, if allowed) class get-together. Share the link and time and see who shows up to visit, talk and catch up. This lets the teacher check in on how students are doing. It is a chance to continue the sense of community that was created earlier when everyone was together in the school building.
Use Zoom to play games together as a group. Check out this video to get some ideas for games and get your creative juices flowing as you think up ways to customize them to your students: 20 Fun Games to Play on Zoom | Easy Virtual Zoom Games for Families
Think of creating a reward system to motivate students incorporating some of these on-line incentives from PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports): More than 100 Distance Learning / eLearning Incentive Ideas
Make use of interactive web sites like Free Rice, Quizlet, Kahoot, ReadWorks, and Khan academy.
A second approach is to reflect on why they are not engaged. Once I started teaching remotely and assigning work, I noticed students were often skipping some of the review worksheets and homework assignment I had uploaded. I reached out to my students to see what was going on and discovered that for many of them, my assignments required too many steps with too many different types of technology. For these students, if things did not go as planned, they would have to solve the problem on their own.
If a problem developed, they could not work past it to do the assignment and, instead, would give up. I had to change things to make it easier and more straight forward. Since most of my students did not have printers, I could not expect them to print up the work and complete it with paper and pencil which would have been more straightforward. Work had to be available to them on-line where they could click a box or type an answer in a blank.
To address this, I found a free app called Tiny Scanner that can take a picture of a paper and pencil worksheet and turn it into a .pdf document. I would email that .pdf document to myself and download it to my computer. Next, I used the free website PDFescape (PDFescape.com) to upload the .pdf and add fillable blanks to the document saving it and downloading it back to my computer. This would be the version I uploaded to Google Classroom. My students were able to fill out the worksheet and complete it in simple steps. They could save it and email it me or upload it to Google Classroom. Once I made these changes, I found students completing more of these assignments.
Finally, check out these great videos from Ed Week to highlight some of the challenges of engaging students in distance learning and suggestions how to engage and motivate them. Videos: Student-Motivation Tips for Remote Learning
These are a few ways I have found to keep my students engaged and motivated to do their best learning in a virtual environment. Next, I share a number of ways to explicitly instruct students and explain material they need to master even if you can’t be together in a classroom.