Not just them. Not just us. How partnering with families leads to student success in a virtual learning environment.
Michelda Watson
>> Hello, my name is Michelda Watson and I'm the Family Engagement Director at Georgia Cyber Academy. Before we get started, I'd like to share with you that in the 10 years that I've had this job, I've presented several times and I've never really struggled with presenting until this time. Maybe with a little bit of nerves, but nothing, I mean, nothing like I have in preparing for this presentation. So, I have a brand new appreciation of what our virtual teachers experience on a day-to-day basis. And with that, I'd like to give you a very heartfelt welcome as we begin to look at not just them, not just us, but together we make a difference. Thank you again for joining us today.
I want to begin with us thinking about back to the first day of school for our students in a traditional brick and mortar building, what that may look like. They drive out to the school and the first thing they notice is their principal outside welcoming their students to school. There's a huge welcome sign out front. They walk into the building and they met with their friends there. You know, some of them have own a new outfit, maybe some new shoes and new backpack, and they're so excited to be there.
And they look down that hallway as they begin their journey to their classroom. And they realize, wow, these floors, they're so clean. The halls, they have new paint up on the walls. The bulletin boards have been decorated, oh my goodness, even the doors are decorated. Everything seems absolutely perfect.
And we get to our classroom and there's Miss Jones with this big smile and she welcomes us to the classroom. We enter the classroom. And it's so exciting as we realize all the different centers are there. She has her bulletin boards decorated. Everything's just amazing.
And then she takes us to her desk and she's created the neatest name tag with our name on it. Let's add that moment when we realized this is going to be the best year ever. Now let's think about what that may look like in a virtual school. Same first day, we're excited. We have a new experience that we're approaching and we have that brand new laptop, and we get to sit down at our desk and we open that laptop and immediately everything seems different.
We have a new school. We have new teachers. We may not see our teachers on the first day of school. We have new platforms that we really don't understand. We have a new schedule and we have that laptop just staring back at us as we look at it trying to figure out what to do.
Let's be honest, it can feel very different. That same hallway we were talking about now seems really empty, almost sterile. It really seems overwhelming as we look down that long, long hallway and we realize that our classroom is all the way down that hallway on the right. But let's imagine that we had someone to meet us at the beginning of that hallway with a big smile. With a personalized welcome to us that takes our hand and leads us down that hallway, showing as we go what the different rooms or platforms are.
Showing us how everything worked in this brand new school of ours as she walks us down the hallway to meet our teacher. That's what our Family Success Liaisons do. As our families navigate that virtual hallway in their classroom, we realize many may need additional support, especially as we're dealing with parents and grandparents that may not be as tech savvy as they need to be, and may even have additional needs that our hardworking teachers just don't have the time to assist them with. GCA recognize this, they understood that our teachers couldn't possibly teach all of the classes they teach, and support our families the way they needed to be supported. That's why they created the Family Academic Support Team.
A team of certified teachers, learning coaches and other professionals who walk beside our teachers and staff to support our students and learning coaches. I have the pleasure and honor of working with this amazing team every day and I am truly excited to share with you what we do. Our Family Success Liaisons also known as FSLs makeup this incredible Family Academic Support Team. We currently have 81 Family Success Liaisons. And our goal, our main goal is to work with our families and build relationships with them.
I have to pause here for just a second and explain to you that it's not just an FSL per student. So when I say family, I truly mean the entire family. We have some families with six or seven students in our school and it would be quite the task for them to deal with six or seven different FSLs. So, we appointed -- we assign our FSLs by family so that family of seven students in grades K through 12, would still only have that one FSL. Key ingredient here is also building relationships is it's really important for us that our families are able to reach out to us.
We want them to want to share their life experiences, whether it be wonderful news that they're going through or whether it can be tragedy that they're experienced. We truly want them to feel free to reach out to us and want to. We are the main point of contact for that family in the schools. We collaborate with our teachers and our parents. We empower students to overcome challenges that they may face in the virtual school environment, whether that's time management or organization, or anything that we can support we try to do so.
We work together with teachers and families to provide that help that they need for students to be successful. We guide and direct our students through using the platforms and we inform students and families of school updates and information. Friends, I'm proud here to share with you our marketing department share posts this summer of different staff members just to promote different things we were doing and they shared this one about one of our FSLs. I wanted to share with you the comments that were made. Underneath this post, one of them said can't wait to get our application processed and get our FSL.
Another one said Brittany is an outstanding Family Success Liaison. I love working with her every day and the sweet positive energy she brings to her families is a huge bonus. And this might be my favorite. This person says, FSL team is unmatched and support for our families at GCA. Thank you for -- thank you all for being great.
I love that. We do a lot of things for our school and this is just a small list of the things we do. And I wanted to kind of give you some background on how we decide what we're going to participate in. If we're asked to help with any task or assignment that needs support, the first thing we do is ask ourselves, will this impact our families? And if the answer to that is, yes, then we absolutely try our best to support it. For example, you'll see reregistration listed up here.
When we were asked to help with that task, we started thinking, will our family struggle with that? Will they understand how to do it? Will they be challenged by the process? And of course the answer was, yes, for some of our family. So of course we learned it with the enrollment team and we stepped in to support that. You'll also notice on the left side that we have something called orientation or onboarding. That is our Strong Start Program. We begin every year with a program called Strong Start, and this is where we made our families at the beginning of that long virtual hallway and welcome them to school.
Strong Start is our initial step in building those relationships with our families. This year for the first time we've created a course in Canvas to house our orientations, and I will be honest with you it's one of the best things we have done to date. Strong Start is an orientation provided for our new families. It is created in Canvas so that not only -- they not only learn about the different platforms they'll also learn Canvas by going through this interactive course. The modules in this course contain the information that is absolutely critical for success at Georgia Cyber Academy.
We can also view each learning coaches usage and the course is saved in Canvas and can be used throughout the year as a resource for families to use at anytime they need it. Our modules include GCA school culture and review, G-suite, Clever, Canvas, Jigsaw, Infinite Campus, acceptable use policy, who can help me, and resources. You may ask yourself, how does the course help your parents? Well, besides the obvious of showing them different things about our school, it also allows parents to learn how to download resources from Canvas as they're embedded documents. Parents also understand how to use media when they watch the embedded videos. They discover additional resources and how to navigate to an external site, because we have links to our school website in the course.
Parents also understand how their student will be expected to complete work in Canvas, because we give them quizzes throughout the course. This course also helps GCA, it's a great way of collecting data. Our parents sign agreements to the handbooks and other required forms that they have access to directly in the course. Our FSLs can also see immediate feedback on a parent's level of understanding in the platforms we use. Resource staff and FSLs can direct parents to the course for review all year.
If a compliance specialist realizes that the family is not logged in attendance correctly, they can say, hey, this is in this module in the Strong Start course please go back and review it. It also gives lab course updates. So, we have real time updates when any processes change. This is some data as of September 1, you'll notice that almost 7000 families were enrolled in the course. We had almost about 5300 that had started some work and completed it and then we had almost 1500 that had not completed any work in the course.
And some really fun things to share with you are a couple of quotes that I shared and one is from Rosie Lowndes, our middle school principal. She says, "The new Canvas Strong Start was very effective as we noticed a decrease in the number of questions clarifications from our new students. We love that they were not only learning how to be successful Virtual Learning coach, but actually practicing using Canvas which is the mothership for all of their contents, win-win, we agree. " And then one of our FSL said, "Having the Canvas Strong Start course was a game changer for our new families. I was able to direct many questions back to that course.
It was also a great resource for myself. " We had many people comment on our Strong Start SWOT analysis that we just completed, the number one thing that they found as a strength was our Strong Start course this year. But not only do we have our Strong Start course, we also have a our same strong prep course, which is very similar to the Strong Start course that it's created with our returning families in mind. We also offer both of these courses in a student course for our students to participate in as well. So we've talked about who we are and who do we work alongside of to help support our families, that would include our teachers, our counselors, our family engagement coordinators, our school principals, our enrollment team, our IT department, and everyone else who works alongside of this to help our families become successful.
But how can we work together? How do we work together to truly help our students become more successful? We feel there were things we can do to do this and to become more successful in our positions. One of the things we can do is to foster relationships between each other, between our families and our students. We need to appreciate each other, we need to engage and encourage more students, we need to understand more of departmental responsibilities, and we need to communicate. And today, possibly more than any time in the past, we need that. We need to build those relationships.
In today's unprecedented times, our families are experiencing things they've never experienced before. Our families are worried. They're truly worried about their jobs, keeping their homes, putting food on the table. They're worried about health, they're worried about sickness, they're worried about COVID-19. And now add to that, that they've got their students at home trying to figure out online learning for the first time ever.
With all of this going on, it is more important than ever that we pause and we focus on those relationships, because they're really going to make a difference in helping our students be successful in our virtual schools. As you can see, we all have a lot on our plates. Our teachers do, our homeroom teachers do, our Family Success Liaisons do, but if we can work together, we can absolutely be successful in this environment. We may know things in FSL world that you may need to know and vice versa. You know, you may not be able to get in touch with little Jessica, because every phone number you've tried and you found on Infinite Campus, you can't -- they won't answer.
It's no longer in service. But say you reach out to your FSL and ask her if she knows anything and she can tell you, oh, yes ma'am, I just talked with Jessica's mother this morning and her phone broke. And she ended up having to get a new phone and a new number. Let me share that with you so now you can reach out to Jessica's mom and help her with whatever you were trying to reach her with. Miss Rita Pierson is one of my all time favorites and I absolutely love this quote she says, "Every child deserves a champion -- an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insist they become the best they can possibly be.
" Let's think about that. What would happen if that child had a team of champions? As teachers and FSLs, and all of the other people involved in their education surround that student to make sure they're successful, what a difference it would make? I want to share with you just for a moment, this video by one of our FSLs, Miss Donna Cardot. So I hope you enjoy this. >> Hello, my name is Donna Cardot and I'm a Family Success Liaison at Georgia Cyber Academy. I have been a learning coach and mom to my four children for 13 years at GCA and worked the last five of those as a Family Academic Support Liaison and Family Success Liaison.
I absolutely love being an FSL. Why? Because it gives me the opportunity to build a special connection on things. And when you think about it, how awesome is it for our families to have one point of contact year after year that they can go to for anything big or small, school related or not, that they can count on no matter what. That is what an FSL does. I'd like to take a moment to share with you a couple of stories about some families I've worked with.
I remember working with a family this past year, where abruptly the student stopped attending class completing assignments and submitting attendance. This was very unusual. So I began digging. And after several attempts to call an email with no success, I decided to push further to figure out what was going on. Weeks went by, numerous GCA staff we're all working together trying to reach his family.
Finally that day came. It turns out that mom had become very sick and quarantined herself, cutting off all communication, as she didn't want to spread it to her family. The student was fairly young, so he didn't really know how to manage for himself, school wise. Once these were brought to the surface, the older sister stepped in to assist as a backup learning coach. I worked diligently with the sister, with mom's permission, of course, to help get them back on track.
The student finished the year passing all of his courses, yey. It's so thrilling to see a student come back like that. Another family that I've worked with, the student and the mom tried really hard but they often came up short. They would get confused and they would miss important things. Towards the end of the first semester, the student received an email that he had missed a lot of classes and was at risk of going to the Academic Review Board.
Mom came to me in a panic. She didn't know what to do and she definitely didn't want her son to be kicked out of school. I explained to them that it was imperative he not miss any more classes. Mom explained to me that they missed those classes for a variety of reasons. I went on further to help them understand that anytime something like that have come up, they need to call me or email me immediately to let me know.
Mom told me that she felt like she already came to me for so many things and she didn't want to be a bother. I was shocked. This was what I was here for. I can't help them if I don't know they're having issues. And I can fix lots of problems pretty quickly.
And if I can't, I know who to go to for help. Mom was still upset but she agreed she would try my plan. We finished the second semester, the student didn't have any more unexcused classes. And in turn, his grades went up. Mom and student were very pleased.
I've had this family with me for two years now. Last year was a lot of changes and it was difficult for many families. Mom told me before the school year ended, that she was so grateful to have me as their FSL and that there was no way they would have made it through these last few years without me. To be honest, I'm grateful to have them as my family as well. And I'm looking forward to the day that he graduates knowing that it was me who had a hand in getting him there.
>> That awesome. Donna does an amazing job with her students. On the family academic support team of Georgia Cyber Academy appreciate you. Together we will make the one yet. Thank you so much. I hope you've enjoyed today and if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.
I want to begin with us thinking about back to the first day of school for our students in a traditional brick and mortar building, what that may look like. They drive out to the school and the first thing they notice is their principal outside welcoming their students to school. There's a huge welcome sign out front. They walk into the building and they met with their friends there. You know, some of them have own a new outfit, maybe some new shoes and new backpack, and they're so excited to be there.
And they look down that hallway as they begin their journey to their classroom. And they realize, wow, these floors, they're so clean. The halls, they have new paint up on the walls. The bulletin boards have been decorated, oh my goodness, even the doors are decorated. Everything seems absolutely perfect.
And we get to our classroom and there's Miss Jones with this big smile and she welcomes us to the classroom. We enter the classroom. And it's so exciting as we realize all the different centers are there. She has her bulletin boards decorated. Everything's just amazing.
And then she takes us to her desk and she's created the neatest name tag with our name on it. Let's add that moment when we realized this is going to be the best year ever. Now let's think about what that may look like in a virtual school. Same first day, we're excited. We have a new experience that we're approaching and we have that brand new laptop, and we get to sit down at our desk and we open that laptop and immediately everything seems different.
We have a new school. We have new teachers. We may not see our teachers on the first day of school. We have new platforms that we really don't understand. We have a new schedule and we have that laptop just staring back at us as we look at it trying to figure out what to do.
Let's be honest, it can feel very different. That same hallway we were talking about now seems really empty, almost sterile. It really seems overwhelming as we look down that long, long hallway and we realize that our classroom is all the way down that hallway on the right. But let's imagine that we had someone to meet us at the beginning of that hallway with a big smile. With a personalized welcome to us that takes our hand and leads us down that hallway, showing as we go what the different rooms or platforms are.
Showing us how everything worked in this brand new school of ours as she walks us down the hallway to meet our teacher. That's what our Family Success Liaisons do. As our families navigate that virtual hallway in their classroom, we realize many may need additional support, especially as we're dealing with parents and grandparents that may not be as tech savvy as they need to be, and may even have additional needs that our hardworking teachers just don't have the time to assist them with. GCA recognize this, they understood that our teachers couldn't possibly teach all of the classes they teach, and support our families the way they needed to be supported. That's why they created the Family Academic Support Team.
A team of certified teachers, learning coaches and other professionals who walk beside our teachers and staff to support our students and learning coaches. I have the pleasure and honor of working with this amazing team every day and I am truly excited to share with you what we do. Our Family Success Liaisons also known as FSLs makeup this incredible Family Academic Support Team. We currently have 81 Family Success Liaisons. And our goal, our main goal is to work with our families and build relationships with them.
I have to pause here for just a second and explain to you that it's not just an FSL per student. So when I say family, I truly mean the entire family. We have some families with six or seven students in our school and it would be quite the task for them to deal with six or seven different FSLs. So, we appointed -- we assign our FSLs by family so that family of seven students in grades K through 12, would still only have that one FSL. Key ingredient here is also building relationships is it's really important for us that our families are able to reach out to us.
We want them to want to share their life experiences, whether it be wonderful news that they're going through or whether it can be tragedy that they're experienced. We truly want them to feel free to reach out to us and want to. We are the main point of contact for that family in the schools. We collaborate with our teachers and our parents. We empower students to overcome challenges that they may face in the virtual school environment, whether that's time management or organization, or anything that we can support we try to do so.
We work together with teachers and families to provide that help that they need for students to be successful. We guide and direct our students through using the platforms and we inform students and families of school updates and information. Friends, I'm proud here to share with you our marketing department share posts this summer of different staff members just to promote different things we were doing and they shared this one about one of our FSLs. I wanted to share with you the comments that were made. Underneath this post, one of them said can't wait to get our application processed and get our FSL.
Another one said Brittany is an outstanding Family Success Liaison. I love working with her every day and the sweet positive energy she brings to her families is a huge bonus. And this might be my favorite. This person says, FSL team is unmatched and support for our families at GCA. Thank you for -- thank you all for being great.
I love that. We do a lot of things for our school and this is just a small list of the things we do. And I wanted to kind of give you some background on how we decide what we're going to participate in. If we're asked to help with any task or assignment that needs support, the first thing we do is ask ourselves, will this impact our families? And if the answer to that is, yes, then we absolutely try our best to support it. For example, you'll see reregistration listed up here.
When we were asked to help with that task, we started thinking, will our family struggle with that? Will they understand how to do it? Will they be challenged by the process? And of course the answer was, yes, for some of our family. So of course we learned it with the enrollment team and we stepped in to support that. You'll also notice on the left side that we have something called orientation or onboarding. That is our Strong Start Program. We begin every year with a program called Strong Start, and this is where we made our families at the beginning of that long virtual hallway and welcome them to school.
Strong Start is our initial step in building those relationships with our families. This year for the first time we've created a course in Canvas to house our orientations, and I will be honest with you it's one of the best things we have done to date. Strong Start is an orientation provided for our new families. It is created in Canvas so that not only -- they not only learn about the different platforms they'll also learn Canvas by going through this interactive course. The modules in this course contain the information that is absolutely critical for success at Georgia Cyber Academy.
We can also view each learning coaches usage and the course is saved in Canvas and can be used throughout the year as a resource for families to use at anytime they need it. Our modules include GCA school culture and review, G-suite, Clever, Canvas, Jigsaw, Infinite Campus, acceptable use policy, who can help me, and resources. You may ask yourself, how does the course help your parents? Well, besides the obvious of showing them different things about our school, it also allows parents to learn how to download resources from Canvas as they're embedded documents. Parents also understand how to use media when they watch the embedded videos. They discover additional resources and how to navigate to an external site, because we have links to our school website in the course.
Parents also understand how their student will be expected to complete work in Canvas, because we give them quizzes throughout the course. This course also helps GCA, it's a great way of collecting data. Our parents sign agreements to the handbooks and other required forms that they have access to directly in the course. Our FSLs can also see immediate feedback on a parent's level of understanding in the platforms we use. Resource staff and FSLs can direct parents to the course for review all year.
If a compliance specialist realizes that the family is not logged in attendance correctly, they can say, hey, this is in this module in the Strong Start course please go back and review it. It also gives lab course updates. So, we have real time updates when any processes change. This is some data as of September 1, you'll notice that almost 7000 families were enrolled in the course. We had almost about 5300 that had started some work and completed it and then we had almost 1500 that had not completed any work in the course.
And some really fun things to share with you are a couple of quotes that I shared and one is from Rosie Lowndes, our middle school principal. She says, "The new Canvas Strong Start was very effective as we noticed a decrease in the number of questions clarifications from our new students. We love that they were not only learning how to be successful Virtual Learning coach, but actually practicing using Canvas which is the mothership for all of their contents, win-win, we agree. " And then one of our FSL said, "Having the Canvas Strong Start course was a game changer for our new families. I was able to direct many questions back to that course.
It was also a great resource for myself. " We had many people comment on our Strong Start SWOT analysis that we just completed, the number one thing that they found as a strength was our Strong Start course this year. But not only do we have our Strong Start course, we also have a our same strong prep course, which is very similar to the Strong Start course that it's created with our returning families in mind. We also offer both of these courses in a student course for our students to participate in as well. So we've talked about who we are and who do we work alongside of to help support our families, that would include our teachers, our counselors, our family engagement coordinators, our school principals, our enrollment team, our IT department, and everyone else who works alongside of this to help our families become successful.
But how can we work together? How do we work together to truly help our students become more successful? We feel there were things we can do to do this and to become more successful in our positions. One of the things we can do is to foster relationships between each other, between our families and our students. We need to appreciate each other, we need to engage and encourage more students, we need to understand more of departmental responsibilities, and we need to communicate. And today, possibly more than any time in the past, we need that. We need to build those relationships.
In today's unprecedented times, our families are experiencing things they've never experienced before. Our families are worried. They're truly worried about their jobs, keeping their homes, putting food on the table. They're worried about health, they're worried about sickness, they're worried about COVID-19. And now add to that, that they've got their students at home trying to figure out online learning for the first time ever.
With all of this going on, it is more important than ever that we pause and we focus on those relationships, because they're really going to make a difference in helping our students be successful in our virtual schools. As you can see, we all have a lot on our plates. Our teachers do, our homeroom teachers do, our Family Success Liaisons do, but if we can work together, we can absolutely be successful in this environment. We may know things in FSL world that you may need to know and vice versa. You know, you may not be able to get in touch with little Jessica, because every phone number you've tried and you found on Infinite Campus, you can't -- they won't answer.
It's no longer in service. But say you reach out to your FSL and ask her if she knows anything and she can tell you, oh, yes ma'am, I just talked with Jessica's mother this morning and her phone broke. And she ended up having to get a new phone and a new number. Let me share that with you so now you can reach out to Jessica's mom and help her with whatever you were trying to reach her with. Miss Rita Pierson is one of my all time favorites and I absolutely love this quote she says, "Every child deserves a champion -- an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insist they become the best they can possibly be.
" Let's think about that. What would happen if that child had a team of champions? As teachers and FSLs, and all of the other people involved in their education surround that student to make sure they're successful, what a difference it would make? I want to share with you just for a moment, this video by one of our FSLs, Miss Donna Cardot. So I hope you enjoy this. >> Hello, my name is Donna Cardot and I'm a Family Success Liaison at Georgia Cyber Academy. I have been a learning coach and mom to my four children for 13 years at GCA and worked the last five of those as a Family Academic Support Liaison and Family Success Liaison.
I absolutely love being an FSL. Why? Because it gives me the opportunity to build a special connection on things. And when you think about it, how awesome is it for our families to have one point of contact year after year that they can go to for anything big or small, school related or not, that they can count on no matter what. That is what an FSL does. I'd like to take a moment to share with you a couple of stories about some families I've worked with.
I remember working with a family this past year, where abruptly the student stopped attending class completing assignments and submitting attendance. This was very unusual. So I began digging. And after several attempts to call an email with no success, I decided to push further to figure out what was going on. Weeks went by, numerous GCA staff we're all working together trying to reach his family.
Finally that day came. It turns out that mom had become very sick and quarantined herself, cutting off all communication, as she didn't want to spread it to her family. The student was fairly young, so he didn't really know how to manage for himself, school wise. Once these were brought to the surface, the older sister stepped in to assist as a backup learning coach. I worked diligently with the sister, with mom's permission, of course, to help get them back on track.
The student finished the year passing all of his courses, yey. It's so thrilling to see a student come back like that. Another family that I've worked with, the student and the mom tried really hard but they often came up short. They would get confused and they would miss important things. Towards the end of the first semester, the student received an email that he had missed a lot of classes and was at risk of going to the Academic Review Board.
Mom came to me in a panic. She didn't know what to do and she definitely didn't want her son to be kicked out of school. I explained to them that it was imperative he not miss any more classes. Mom explained to me that they missed those classes for a variety of reasons. I went on further to help them understand that anytime something like that have come up, they need to call me or email me immediately to let me know.
Mom told me that she felt like she already came to me for so many things and she didn't want to be a bother. I was shocked. This was what I was here for. I can't help them if I don't know they're having issues. And I can fix lots of problems pretty quickly.
And if I can't, I know who to go to for help. Mom was still upset but she agreed she would try my plan. We finished the second semester, the student didn't have any more unexcused classes. And in turn, his grades went up. Mom and student were very pleased.
I've had this family with me for two years now. Last year was a lot of changes and it was difficult for many families. Mom told me before the school year ended, that she was so grateful to have me as their FSL and that there was no way they would have made it through these last few years without me. To be honest, I'm grateful to have them as my family as well. And I'm looking forward to the day that he graduates knowing that it was me who had a hand in getting him there.
>> That awesome. Donna does an amazing job with her students. On the family academic support team of Georgia Cyber Academy appreciate you. Together we will make the one yet. Thank you so much. I hope you've enjoyed today and if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.