All Articles tagged high-school.

Enhancing Your Digital Workstation

August 24, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

With public schools and private schools resuming for this new school year, all of our families are actively engaged in virtual, hybrid or in-person learning. Since the start of Covid, we’ve heard a lot of feedback from families and school colleagues about this huge adjustment to the multiple locations their students need to navigate and organizing a digital workstation that works well in each location. Technology hiccups and some lost instructional time occurred, too, which was anticipated. In the virtual learning space, parents have found themselves doing a lot of teaching, particularly in the morning, in order to help their kids get ready for planned classes or teacher check-ins during the day. Many parents have also felt overwhelmed trying to print resources, access sites, or troubleshoot sessions during their own work day.

Based on families’ feedback, there seems to be variability across schools and between schools. One concern we’ve continued to hear— from teachers and families — is that poor wifi strength creates instructional disruptions; and digital tools require patience and troubleshooting, which can be difficult for many students to manage independently. To that end, it’s important to think strategically about both your physical and digital workstations as we’ll continue to make use of these tools in the coming months and years. Faya and I have been working from home for over 12 years now, so we know it takes a lot of careful planning and investment. To the extent you’re able to optimize your own physical and digital workstation, and your child’s own physical digital workstation, it stands to make distance learning and working remotely a more joyous, productive, and positive experience.

To help, we’ve put together the following “Think Abouts” for organizing your physical and digital workspaces:

Your Physical and Digital Workstation

Do you and your child each have separate physical and digital workstations?
Does your child have an ample supply of writing tools, including pencils, pens, highlighters, markers, or crayons as appropriate? Are these well organized at your child’s workstation in order to minimize lost time and disruptions?
Would your child benefit from either a small white board and/or larger white board for managing goals, to-do items, sub-tasking larger assignments, or planning?
Do you have tools to support time management, including various types of timers or a big, non-ticking analog clock with a glass face on which students can write with dry erase markers to actively “mark up” their intended timing?
Is there a visual and/or auditory barrier to help mitigate disruptions?
Do you have sufficient lighting?
Would your student benefit from a standing desk or balance board?
Where is the printer? Who accesses it? How frequently? If your child likes to print things, are you stocked up on paper and toner?
If you or your child only works on a laptop or an iPad, might you benefit from upgrading to a larger monitor (or two)? When doing a lot of research across multiple sources or documents, or using a number of applications simultaneously, it can be easier to stay organized on a larger and/or multiple screens. A larger monitor also allows for enlarged text, which can make reading, editing, or revising easier.
Do you and/or your child have a writing tablet with a stylus?
Do you and/or your child have a small document camera (which can also serve as a webcam)?
Would your child or family benefit from a small, high-speed scanner?
Would your elementary or middle school child benefit from a small math center stocked with concrete manipulatives, such as base ten blocks, fraction towers, a yard stick, a geared clock, a geoboard, or geometry solids?
Do you have a small home library of picture books or chapter books in print?

Digital Platforms and Related Skills

Do you or your child know how to use digital white boarding?
Do you or your child know more than one way to manage screen sharing?
Do you or your child know more than one way to connect by video conference? Have you or your child practiced extensively with each of these platforms, including Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype, or FaceTime.
Do you or your child have familiarity with Google Classroom?
Do you or your child know how to manage Google Drive in order to create shared folders and facilitate collaborative writing? Does this management include creating folders and managing documents so that they’re organized and searchable in effective ways?
Is your phone a hotspot? Do you know how to use it? This contingency planning is important in the event that Spectrum — or whomever your internet service provider (ISP) is — experiences an interruption.

Wifi Troubleshooting Tips

Wifi strength depends on a number of factors, including the incoming signal strength, the modem device, the router device, distance from the router and overall square footage, and the building materials.
When was the last time you restarted both your modem and your router as regular maintenance? As a simple first step, try unplugging each device, restarting the modem first, and then restarting the router in order to resolve any performance issues.
How old is your router? How many square feet is it covering? The new mesh routers are really good. We just installed a Netgear Orbi — there are several versions available, including the newest which supports wifi6 (although that speed and expense isn’t necessary) — and the setup was pretty quick and painless. The improved performance is notable and it resolved dead spots for us right away. Moreover, there are easy to use parent controls built into the mobile app, which allows parents to turn off specific devices from accessing wifi.
Could your child’s laptop or desktop be hard wired to the router rather than relying on wifi? If the laptop doesn’t allow for this connection, selecting a larger monitor to which it could connect might then allow for this option.

We know that optimizing a physical and digital workstation — or dealing with digital infrastructure — is a lot to manage. At the same time, it’s a concrete step that can help to improve the instructional experience and restore a certain level or order while directly building executive function and new digital skills.

If you have questions, concerns, or ideas, we’d be happy to listen, help, and troubleshoot with you as needed. Our digital coaching can be differentiated for students of all ages, including adults! Please don’t hesitate to reach out!

By Brad Hoffman, M.S.Ed.
Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist
My Learning Springboard, Inc.

Back to School Organizing for Middle Schoolers

August 21, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Now is the time of year when “Back to School” commercials often appear. Suddenly, as middle schoolers with backpacks and shiny sneakers parade across the television screen, we are filled with disbelief at how quickly the summer has flown by, and excitement about what the new school year will bring.

Many middle schoolers start the year with a backpack full of fresh school supplies – clean binders, unsharpened pencils, folders that make a satisfying “crack” the first time they’re opened. Every year, we find that students try to put these supplies to good use at the beginning of the year and stay quite organized during the first days and weeks.

And every year, a few weeks into school, we notice that many middle schoolers begin struggling to find specific papers amidst a growing pile of handouts, homework assignments, and permission slips. Especially for students just starting middle school, September often marks the first time they will need to balance multiple subjects, different teachers’ expectations, and a larger number of papers and assignments.

Here are some helpful tips to help middle schoolers stay organized this September and beyond:

Use binders instead of folders if your teachers allow it. Folders often lead to an explosion of handouts that are crushed and out of order. In a binder, you can rifle through papers more easily.
Depending on the number of classes you have, you may want a 1-inch binder for each subject. Make sure each binder is a different color with the name of the subject on the front and side so you can locate it easily in your locker and backpack.
Place a flat 3-hole punch and a small ream of reinforcements in the front of your binder so you can keep papers hole-punched and in the proper place.
Keep handouts in chronological order. When a teacher asks you to take out a paper, it will be much simpler to find it if papers are in the order in which they were given out. It will also be easier to consult notes or study for a test when papers are in the same order as they were when you looked at them in class.
Remove extra pages from your binder after each unit. For example, once your class has finished discussing a book in English, ask the teacher if you can remove papers related to that book. Keep extra binders or folders at home or in your locker to file those papers and free up your binder for new materials. However, do not throw out papers until at least the end of the school year since you may need them again.
Use an assignment book or planner. Create a section for each subject, and list homework every day. That way, you will know which binders and books to take home. After you complete each assignment, check it off in your planner. It will feel great to know that you’re staying organized and on top of your work!

For middle schoolers needing additional help keeping things organized, contact us to meet with a private tutor and executive function coach that will help your child learn and practice those lifelong skills.

Written by: Editorial Team, My Learning Springboard, Inc.

Being The Teacher Is a Powerful Learning Strategy

August 19, 2021 Brad Hoffman 1 Comment

OK…as a parent, teacher, coach, or private tutor….it is our job to teach, right? Well, yes, but not always. One of the most powerful teaching tools we have is giving our students the “job” of being the teacher and teaching us. There are several specific reasons for this:

First, often the role of “purveyor of knowledge” is very appealing to kids. I have watched students of all types rise to the occasion of being the teacher. It seems especially appealing if they are asked to teach one or two younger children, or if they are asked to teach an adult!

Second, I have found that I cannot teach anything I don’t truly understand. In the process of teaching, I often uncover any slightly murky parts of my own understanding. This leads me to more thinking and better understanding of the topic. For students who take on the role of being the teacher, the same often holds true. As they try to teach me, they discover what they truly DO know, as well as what is still unclear. Finding out what questions they still need to ask makes them better learners.

Third, we learn a great deal about our students’ depth of understanding by truly listening to what they “teach” us. (Note: truly listening can be a challenge for those of us who are bursting with excitement to teach or who are up against a time crunch or any number of other stressors, but listening is essential.) In the role of “learner” we can appropriately ask questions which will clarify what they really know. We can also determine whether their knowledge is rote (memorization of formulas, timelines, etc.) or actual conceptual understanding of ideas and processes. In some cases, we can guide deeper understanding through creative questioning. Other times we simply uncover misunderstandings and/or shallow understanding that guides our next steps in instruction. Sometimes the discovery is not in the precise area of instruction but in a crucial related area! These “teachable moments” can be especially beneficial to our students.

One of my favorite collateral “wins” from giving students the powerful role of being the teacher is that they really do teach me new learning. My own, very legitimate, excitement about learning something new is contagious. It is valuable for students to realize that respected adults continue to learn, and that we are excited about learning, all the time. By being open to thinking about ideas in new and different ways, I am validating their thinking process and the control they have over their own learning; and I learn something new myself! Now that is powerful!

By Jean Snyder, Private Tutor

ADHD and Executive Function: The Power of Positive Routines

August 12, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Most parents and educators are already aware that an ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) diagnosis can correlate to significant academic challenges for students of all ages. From mindfulness to medication, there are lots of ways for families looking to support their students’ success at school. But for kids with ADHD diagnoses to really shine, strategies at home are just as important as classroom strategies. Executive function techniques are a great way to build at-home supports for students dealing with ADHD, and it can be particularly helpful to focus on developing positive routines that make students’ lives more predictable. Here are three kinds of positive routines to consider if your child has an ADHD diagnosis:

1. Take charge of tools

Binders, backpacks, and plain old stuff can be enormous stumbling blocks for children with ADHD. Homework gets buried under sports gear; permission slips get crumpled into instrument cases; bags fill up with unneeded books until they’re too heavy to lift. Building positive routines around backpacks, binders, and anything else your student carries to and from school can be a powerful way to corral all the mess and minimize distractions from actual schoolwork. Make a daily rundown of these items part of your child’s routine; the idea is to glance—quickly!—at each item in each container and practice making decisions about where each one belongs. In general, it’s helpful for kids to think in terms of three categories:

Stays where it is;
Goes somewhere else (like a storage bin at home, back to the school library, or into the laundry);
Gets thrown away (or recycled).

Even just sorting into these simple categories can go a long way toward helping students with ADHD learn basic executive function skills. What’s more, there’s lots of room here for students to customize this routine. Some students might want to do this right after school; some might prefer after dinner. Some students might want to keep pencils in a fancy case, while others are happy stowing them all in a backpack pocket. Some students might want to carry a book to read for fun with them at all times (never mind the extra weight!), and some will enjoy the challenge of keeping their bags as light as possible. There’s no one right way for students with ADHD to decide what to with all their stuff; rather, the important thing is that they do decide, and that doing so becomes a positive routine with an outcome that they value.

2. Make homework predictable

For many students who have ADHD diagnoses, the issue with homework isn’t academic content; it’s figuring out how to tackle the homework process itself. Staring down a pile of assignments and a packed planner can leave even strong students feeling anxious. One great solution for this issue is to work with your student on building a personalized, positive routine to structure the homework process. This kind of positive routine will be different for different kids, but no matter the specifics, an effective homework routine should help students answer three key questions:

Where do I start?
What comes next?
How do I know when I’m done?

Accordingly, a positive routine for homework should always start the same way. For most students, part of this starting phase will be looking over assignments and gathering up stray materials, but it will also include different components for different students. For example, it could mean getting a favorite snack or drink, settling into a familiar workspace, or turning on a white noise playlist. The more consistent, the better, but again, this kind of positive routine works best when the student has a real say in shaping it—that is, forcing a student to sit at a desk when they’d rather work on the floor usually won’t do much good. Then, the homework routine should also include a predicable way to organize assignments: Should the hardest assignment come first? The easiest? Or maybe the math assignment? For students with ADHD, knowing how to tackle assignments is as important as mastering content. Finally, be sure that the routine ends on a positive, consistent note; this could be as simple as putting a sticker on the date in the student’s planner. Again, the idea is to reduce stress and demands on the the student’s attention by making homework as predictable as possible.

3. Expect the unexpected

Daily routines are great for students with ADHD, but it’s just as important to build positive routines into your student’s long-term planning. ADHD can sometimes cause students to get caught up in day-to-day concerns, which only creates more stress when they realize they’ve forgotten to plan for a big project or event. Try picking a time once a week to guide your student in thinking through the big picture of the coming weeks and even months. As with the positive routines described above, it’s helpful to do this at a consistent time and place—Monday evenings after dinner, for example. During this conversation, you and your student (along with other members of the family as necessary) will want to look over the following resources:

The student’s personal planner;
The school’s calendar and online schedule tool (be sure your student is familiar with how their school’s web resources work!);
The family’s overall calendar.

By checking each of these resources (and any others that serve similar purposes) on a regular basis, your student won’t be unpleasantly surprised by that science project, basketball tournament, or long weekend out of town. What’s more, this positive routine gives students a chance to plan out necessary steps ahead of time (like buying supplies for the project)—which can in turn give them an increased sense of mastery over their lives. Planning is empowering, and with practice, most students will learn to stick with this positive routine even without guidance from parents.

School can be daunting for students with ADHD, but by building these simple, positive routines outside the classroom, they’ll have another valuable tool for reducing stress and increasing focus.

By Hannah Sheldon-Dean, MSW

School Planning Considerations: 2021-2022 and 2022-2023

May 12, 2021 Brad Hoffman

Summer and Fall School Planning

It is with gratitude and hope that we proceed through the final push of this most unusual 2020-2021 school year. The rules of the road have changed continuously since the start of the pandemic with each week bringing new surprises; announcements from schools, colleges, and publishers along with local, state, and federal government agencies have made surviving this school year a real test of flexibility, tenacity, and creative problem solving. The resilience of our families, faculty, and professional colleagues is inspiring, and we’re grateful for our close partnerships with everyone, including school teams and related service professionals across the country. Together we’ve mastered new technologies to support continuous, high quality instruction; we’ve successfully navigated admissions and school planning for day schools, boarding schools, and colleges entirely virtually; we’ve speculated and hedged with plans A through Z to address learning and emotional challenges in a way that takes executive functions and our “future glasses” to a new extreme. Despite all the challenges, our students have come out on top, and we’ve delighted in their incredible successes!

With the 4th quarter of this school year now coming to a close, we look ahead to the summer 2021 and next school year with hope and anticipation of a return to more normal operations. Realistically, we expect next school year will have continued challenges as schools manage shifting policies, social distancing, and safety protocols, but it’s our hope that everyone will have a chance to recover and rejoice this summer by safely reuniting with family and friends in person, enjoying camp and summer travels, and breaking some of the difficult routines that have been so necessary to manage the past 14 months. Last summer was spent in nonstop speculation and school planning mode, and we hope this summer will provide some much needed relief from the constant feeling of uncertainty.

In order to make the most of summer 2021 and truly enjoy some respite from a wild school year, we strongly encourage families to make the most of May and June with regard to school planning for the fall and addressing any significant academic concerns as a result of the past 14 months. Remediation works best when the pressure is dialed down, and there’s no question that slow and steady wins the race. Moreover, test preparation for independent school admissions and college admissions works best when it’s structured and mapped out over a reasonably long runway to avoid cramming and unnecessary stress ahead of early decision and regular decision deadlines spanning November, December and January. Test-optional policies create a lot of confusion about what’s expected to be a competitive candidate, and now is the time to organize these planning conversations to avoid a fall blitz.

Whatever planning support you may need, we’re here for you, and we look forward to our continued partnership with your family.

Below you’ll find more information about: 1) benchmarking your child’s progress this school year, 2) summer enrichment teaching opportunities, 3) standardized testing in this climate, and 4) starting the common application essay.

Benchmarking Student Progress

The 2020-21 school year was more organized than the 4th quarter of the 2019-2020 school year, but it was a very challenging year nonetheless. For September 2021, all classroom teachers and schools are going to need to adjust their typical expectations to some degree because of Covid disruptions. Our lower school students — and particularly our students in the primary grades — are likely going to be reading, writing, and completing math work below typical benchmarks as a result of missed instruction. Despite a school’s best efforts, pivoting to distance learning and online learning so quickly was a Herculean effort, and there was simply no way to perfectly optimize it under these circumstances. Moreover, there’s simply no replacement for in-person instruction and live classroom discourse. Digitals tools provide lots of opportunities and accessibility, but we typically prefer to use them as a complement to in-person instruction, especially with our younger students.

Many parents have inquired about benchmarking and making sense of report cards in this climate for school planning purposes. They aren’t sure if their child is meeting grade level expectations or not. It’s surely not a guessing game, and parents don’t really need to wonder. The Common Core State Standards provide an excellent starting point for benchmarking, and while private schools don’t strictly follow these standards, many of them use these standards to guide their own curriculum mapping. For competitive NYC private schools, parents should look at typical grade level standards and reading benchmarks and then skew up a grade level. Keep in mind that standards aren’t “one and done” but rather build over time and across grade levels.

Since the Common Core website can be overwhelming for many parents to navigate, we like this alternative format developed by Jill McEldowney and Cathy Henry at The Curriculum Corner. For Kindergarten through 8th grades, they have created parent-friendly checklists based on CCSS in the form of “I Can…” statements available as both Excel and PDF formats.

We also make use of the Teachers College Columbia University Reading and Writing Project independent reading level quarterly benchmarking. It’s best not to get hung up on a single exit level for June but rather to think about reading levels in bands of two to three alpha letters. Performance with fiction and nonfiction texts may differ, and writing response work needs to be factored into benchmarking, particularly as students move into grades 2, 3, 4, and 5.

So while benchmarking doesn’t need to be a guessing game, it’s also not simple and quick. Ideally a portfolio of work from the entire school year is available to help guide benchmarking and school planning in addition to a variety of data points, including classroom work, homework, projects, grade level achievement testing (e.g. CTP testing), and informal classroom assessments (e.g. running records and spelling inventories). As for typing skills, typing.com offers typing speed guidelines for grades K-5.

Summer Enrichment Opportunities

Because this was such a strange school year, and because many camp and summer programs are modified, there’s an opportunity to use the summer season as an extended school year term, thus helping to avoid the summer slide. But summer learning can and should look different from academic year learning. Kids need to feel like they’re getting a break. They need to feel like the instructional time is something different. Summer learning, without school parameters in place, allows for more targeted instruction as well as project-based, interdisciplinary learning. The summer is a good time to close gaps, build expertise, or expand a passion. Ideally, the learning goals are driven by each student, which we can help to scaffold depending on age. With the help of creative and nimble educators — and the mindset that learning happens all the time and everywhere — the sky’s the limit with summer planning and school planning at large, and we welcome any special requests.

Here are some ideas from our teachers:

- Physics Lab at Home combines the rigor of an in-person lab while using the constraints imposed by remote learning to foster creativity and stimulate critical thinking. Students perform experiments at home with whatever materials they have at hand. They make measurements with both simple instruments they may have and with their cellphones. Students explore mechanics, electromagnetism, optics and thermodynamics in one-on-one sessions designed to illustrate a simple, profound truth: the world around us is governed by the laws of science.

- Book Groups for a few friends who haven’t been able to see each other in person. A group of cousins or other family members who usually gather during the summer at the family vacation house might also want to “meet” to discuss a high-interest book of their choosing. Mixed age groups can discuss a book that focuses on topics relevant to all or that might illuminate different perspectives. A group of students from the same school can read their assigned summer book together. Our teachers can help groups choose books, come to the meeting with ideas to share, and engage in a friendly, dynamic conversation. This can be a one-time activity or a group may choose to meet a few times over the summer.

- Journal Writing Circles for teens interested in using writing to explore feelings and ideas that might be difficult to talk about or that might normally be shared with friends in more normal times. Budding writers and all students would be encouraged to write informally without worrying about judgment or “correctness,” rather focusing on recalling memories, capturing fleeting thoughts or ideas and expressing themselves through writing. Prompts would be provided either between meetings or at the beginning of the sessions to help students write about a range of experiences. Sharing would be optional.

- Family History Interviews of older relatives with stories to tell! With more time on their hands, students can prepare generative questions to elicit grandparents or other family members’ stories. Working with a supportive teacher, individual students or a small group of students can prepare questions, practice interviewing, read profiles written in different formats and eventually write their own pieces that capture the experiences of their favorite relatives. Photos can be used to enhance the final stories, creating high-quality photo-journalistic pieces.

- Comedy writing is a fun and creative way for kids to learn the conventions of writing and producing content while expressing themselves. My Learning Springboard is offering lessons from TV writing/screenwriting to improv comedy to expository writing and more to keep students’ writing skills sharp in a fun, relaxed setting where they can write pieces that are true to their experiences and personalities. Looking for portfolio pieces to include in art school applications? Our team of teachers have won screenwriting competitions, been nominated for Sports Emmys and more, and they are happy to help hone your student’s voice as a writer and content creator.

- Super-Hero stories is a collaborative course in which students explore the traits and challenges of their favorite superheroes, including Thor, Moana, the Incredibles, and Studio Ghibli’s Chihiro. We will watch video clips and read stories to better understand how superheroes are created (their “origin stories”) and how they change over time. We will also discuss villains and whether so-called “evil” characters such as the Joker, Syndrome, and Disney’s Evil Stepmothers are born “bad” or become this way due to misfortune. Students will get a chance to present their own favorite superheroes from books and film. Then, inspired by the wide world of superheroes, students will get a chance to start thinking of their “superpowers” and how they might use their own special traits to deal with challenges and difficulties. Then, they will create their own unique superhero characters and send them off on missions and adventures. Their superhero stories will be workshopped and we will develop them using imaginative writing prompts. At the end of the course, students are invited to dress up as their characters and share their special superhero stories.

- Real-Life Math and Writing Connections for elementary and middle school students means searching for ways to take fundamental skills that the students need to practice, and repackaging them into activities that target the students’ interests. For example, when practicing mean, median, range, and mode, we might analyze statistics from a student’s favorite sports team. To facilitate teaching writing skills, we pick articles on topics that are interesting to the student. Music, movies, and sports can all provide opportunities for practicing skills. We’re able to push our students to read higher level discussions of the topics that interest them and are intrinsically motivating.

Standardized Test Preparation

The summer season is also an excellent time to get a jump start on standardized test preparation at every level from lower school through college. Given the pandemic, many schools adopted a test-optional policy, which has been confusing for families to navigate and factor into their school planning. The large majority of our students stayed the course with standardized test preparation, which proved to be advantageous. Competitive independent schools and colleges saw huge surges in admissions activity, and it was arguably the most competitive year ever. A solid to strong performance on a standardized measure provides advantageous data for schools to review as part of the process, particularly when the spring term of 2020 and this school year was so unusual. And truly the ISEE or SSAT is just a vehicle for middle or high school readiness. Going through the process closes any gaps and advances reading, writing, and math skills. We typically see huge growth for our students between now and December.

For now, it seems the only age groups that are surely saved from standardized testing are our rising kindergartners and first graders. ERB has officially phased out use of the AABL, and they are not planning to resurrect the ECAA. Schools have created their own assessment protocols for kindergarten and first grade admissions.

The Common Application Essay

Each year, the Common Application itself “resets” in early August, so we advise rising seniors to wait until then to fill out its typable forms; similarly, colleges tend to post their individual supplemental essay prompts in August or early September. But the Common Application has already released its essay prompts for the upcoming application cycle, making spring and summer an ideal time to begin the writing process—particularly this year. Focusing on this effort over the summer gives students some control while challenging themselves creatively, with no pressing deadlines. It is one of the concrete steps that they can take in shaping their future and actively managing their school planning; it’s an opportunity to reflect on where they’ve been—such as a nook on a living-room floor, a treacherous rock wall, or a thumping concert arena—where they are, and where they will go.

By Brad Hoffman, Faya Hoffman, and Laurie Gross
My Learning Springboard Leadership Team