10 Strategies to Help Schools Restart

The reopening of schools this fall will be a challenge that may continue throughout the entire school year.

Here are 10 evidenced-based strategies to help guide you through this stage. Review these strategies and adjust them for your particular needs. Then share them with your principals and/or site leaders. They will help accelerate learning, build student motivation, and create a positive school environment. The detailed version of this blog post is available free as a guide by clicking the link below.

Strategy 1: Start with the whole child

Students and educators have all had the same pandemic-related challenges heaped on everyday challenges. Acknowledge these challenges and build trust. By sharing experiences and letting students tell their stories, you’ll increase your students’ productivity, engagement, and positivity. 

Strategy 2: Reach out to your students’ families

Taking time to develop trust with families will allow you to partner with them to enhance student learning and behavior.

Strategy 3: Share an attitude of positivity

Recognize with your students that a positive attitude will help them learn and thrive.

Strategy 4: Take time to find out all students’ mastery of key reading and math topics

Use evidence-based assessments to find out where your students’ learning gaps are in reading and in math.

You can do this with Let’s Go Learn’s ADAM or DORA assessments to granularly assess each student’s mastery levels and challenges.

Strategy 5: Use small groups to differentiate instruction and whole class activities to build community

Place students into small groups to focus on key learning gaps and and make sure that you also have plenty of whole-class activities that are project-based or experiential to build critical and creative thinking while you build community. Use Let’s Go Learn’s evidence-based instruction programs, LGL Math Edge or LGL ELA Edge, for personalized online learning in reading and math.

Strategy 6: Attend to your students’ Social/Emotional Learning

Social-Emotional Learning programs increase student achievement scores by 11 to 17 percent while reducing behavioral problems and student stress.

Strategy 7: Find simple ways to monitor your students’ progress both academically and positivity

Use LGL’s evidence-based Formative Assessment Process to monitor students and let our system update their instruction throughout the year.

Strategy 8: Achieve equity by distributing positive feedback equally to every student

Keep track of who you praise so that you give it equally to all students, and make sure you do it in a way that is comfortable for each student. With LGL Math Edge or LGL ELA Edge, each student gets a personalized course and goal.

Strategy 9: Celebrate progress with students and their families

Let’s Go Learn supports family engagement initiatives by having reports in Spanish and English as well as reports that anyone can understand.

Strategy 10: Create an atmosphere of happiness in your classroom

Some of us have inherited an attitude that resilience is built from just effort and attitude. Research on joy and trust and happiness has begun to acknowledge their importance in student achievement.

Let’s Go Learn provides many ways for educators to support their schools with the latest in data-driven personalized learning.  Our benefits include:

• Evidence-based online tools to diagnose learning loss
• Automated personalized instruction as as supplement for every child
• Tools to speed up and improve the IEP process
• Progress monitoring that is easy and automated
• Ideal in supporting disadvantaged and at-risk students
• Support of PLCs with actionable data
• Seamless transition for students moving between remote and in-class