Setting Clear Expectations for Student Engagement (KJ Virtual Academy)

Overview

This brief case study features the work one school system completed to address the challenge of student engagement in their virtual and hybrid learning environments. It is part of a larger brief exploring the work that four school system teams undertook in TLA’s Strategy Lab program, which is a networked learning experience that leverages our Real-Time Redesign (RTR) process to help teams identify and address root-cause equity barriers.

Context: Green Bay Area Public School District

KJ Virtual Academy, a hybrid school in the Green Bay Area Public School District in Wisconsin, serves 70 PK-6 students and describes their instructional model as enriched virtual, with a combination of virtual instruction and in-person support. They joined Strategy Lab because they wanted to build a team that would learn, grow, and adapt to better serve students and families.

The Challenge of Engagement: Participation

Each of the districts featured in TLA’s student engagement case study was selected based on their focus on one particular aspect of engagement, ranging on a continuum from foundational (i.e., attendance) to deeper (i.e., active learning) characteristics. Each district chose to focus on an aspect of engagement that emerged from team discussions, self- and team-assessments, and aligned to their reason for joining Strategy Lab. 

Continuum of engagement from foundational tenets to more meaningful learning.

The KJ Virtual team identified a core challenge: how to increase participation in synchronous, virtual classes. They wanted students to attend class and actively participate in discussions as they believed it would support the acquisition of important literacy skills.

The team-assessment and workbook notes indicated that teachers consistently used active learning strategies and provided students with motivating content. Empathy interviews also revealed that students who were actively engaged in all aspects of KJ Academy’s instructional program (i.e., attending synchronous sessions and joining discussions) felt most successful and supported. This realization steered the team toward the task of better defining what engagement looked like in their school setting – specifically for students who did not regularly attend and/or struggled academically. At the same time, the school team recognized that for students to meaningfully engage in their learning, they needed to both be present and actively participate.

Ongoing conversations around current policies and practices led the team to identify a problem of practice: the challenge of increasing student participation in synchronous classes to drive engagement in meaningful learning.

Designing and Piloting a Measurable Solution: Setting Clearer Participation Expectations

In response, they decided to design a pilot program that outlined common expectations for student behavior and engagement in synchronous classes. They hypothesized that if students participated in class discussions and activities, that would translate to increased engagement and higher academic outcomes.

The team designed a pilot that modified an existing small-group instructional model for students who showed delayed literacy growth. Built upon prior success in leveraging small groups to address academic challenges during a reading lesson, the pilot teacher modeled and encouraged students to follow specific expectations, such as turning their cameras on and verbally responding to prompts.

The pilot included two components:

• Targeted Small-Group Support: Over the course of two weeks, the teacher met with selected students for a total of nine 15-minute sessions to focus on students struggling with similar literacy skills and disengagement behavior. Meeting in a small group enabled the teacher to explicitly target actions and behaviors (e.g., cameras on, verbal responses in discussions) that all students needed to improve.
  
  

• Synchronous Engagement: Using a predetermined checklist of expected online behavior, the teacher noted student interactions during synchronous small-group sessions. The purpose was to see if meeting with a smaller group of peers over time would encourage students to exhibit expected participatory behaviors without prompting.

What Happened

The team’s efforts to focus on student participation in synchronous classes produced encouraging results, and educators were able to observe how incremental changes could make a difference.

During the pilot, the teacher recorded whether students followed a predetermined checklist used to measure their level of participation: attendance, camera on/off, voluntary verbal response, and involuntary verbal response. Data from the pilot showed that most students attended class every day, with one student absent for four days due to medical issues. All five students turned their camera on, with the teacher prompting two of them on several occasions. The teacher also reported that the majority of students still needed to be prompted before providing a verbal response. However, she also shared that students voluntarily participated in verbal discussions 42% of the time – an uptick from prior class observations.

Three of the four students who completed a post-pilot survey shared that meeting in a small group helped them academically, and they wanted their teacher to continue using the small group with their class. The pilot teacher noted an increase in reading comprehension scores for three of the five students as well as the transfer of expected online participatory behaviors to other classes. In addition, the teacher observed an overall growth in discussion quality and participation. Most importantly, the pilot teacher relayed that formerly disengaged students seemed to now be more comfortable sharing in front of their peers; a student who previously shied away from the camera did turn it on for every session. Even though the students still needed prompting to verbally respond to questions, they voluntarily offered a response 44% of the time – a particularly positive development.

What’s Next

The school leadership team plans to use lessons from the pilot to inform the design of a handbook and instructional model to include more targeted small-group support across other classes. The team theorized that if they set clear expectations for student participation in synchronous classes, they would see an increase in attendance and engagement, which they believed would positively influence the acquisition of literacy skills. It is important to note that the team intentionally focused the pilot on participation as a foundational tenet of engagement. This plan aligns with the reason why they joined Strategy Lab: to build a team that would learn, grow, and adapt to better serve students and families.