The demands of virtual learning on students\u2019 executive functioning skills are extremely high. Students must manage their own time, prioritize tasks, and stay focused in order to succeed. <\/span><\/p>\n

Y<\/span>ounger students without an adult available at home to help teach these skills struggle immensely to meet these demands. High school students have had to practice these skills throughout their K-12 schooling. With some coaching, our high school volunteers can pass on developmentally-appropriate, bite-sized versions of these skills to younger students. <\/span><\/p>\n

We have all mentors work with their students on building a personalized weekly schedule using a template, as well as preventing overwhelm by identifying the \u201cnext action\u201d that needs to be done for each content area. Many of our mentors have also coached students through emailing teachers to clarify assignment guidelines.<\/span><\/p>\n

3. Academic Support<\/h5>\n

Students\u2019 academic needs vary widely, but one concern that keeps resurfacing in virtual learning is reading comprehension. In any online platform, there is a great deal of reading necessary to navigate and understand the instructions for asynchronous learning. In addition, teachers present much of the learning material across content areas in written form. <\/span><\/p>\n

For students who struggle to read at grade level, the weakness in reading begins to affect their retention of new learning across subject areas. <\/span><\/p>\n

For students who are struggling to comprehend and make meaning from written material in their online courses, our high school mentors will use a variety of strategies to work through the text with them: having the student share their screen and taking turns reading aloud, pausing and asking questions at different points in the text, modeling how to look up unknown words, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n

4. Alert system<\/h5>\n

Without seeing students in person each day, we as a school system lose many contact points that could give us important information about a student. From small things like noticing a child is without a warm jacket, to larger, more serious things like concerns about physical abuse, we worry about how much we just don\u2019t see when students are not at school. <\/span><\/p>\n

Our high school mentors, who get a full 60 minutes of one-on-one time with students each week, serve as an extra set of eyes and ears to alert the adults to potential problems or concerns. Students are often more comfortable turning on their cameras with a mentor. This ultimately gives us a better idea of that student\u2019s learning environment through the mentor\u2019s feedback.<\/span><\/p>\n

Students rise to the challenge<\/h4>\n

Our high school students are an amazing resource, and their maturity and care in working with younger children this semester has been an inspiration and an enormous help for our virtual teachers. I\u2019m sure some of our readers will be curious about specifics with regard to how we identified students in need of mentoring, recruited and trained mentors, and structured the work. <\/span><\/p>\n