As educators across the country look toward the end of the school year, many are faced with the question, “How do we end the year strong?” On Thursday, May 14 two Summit Learning educators — Tynetta Harris an English Language Arts Teacher at Henry Snyder High School in Jersey City, N.J. and Abel Ruiz a Middle School Science Teacher at Aspen Valley Prep in Fresno, Calif. — joined us for a Facebook Live event to discuss their strategies to finish the semester on a positive note and set priorities for the upcoming school year.
Tynetta and Abel discussed how their focus on strong relationships, teaching lifelong learning habits, and the use of real-time data helped not only with academics, but also with meeting students’ social and emotional needs. They also explained the roadblocks they have navigated during remote learning and ones they anticipate between now and the end of the school year.
“Education has become relational. The building is closed but education is not,” said Tynetta.
Abel shared how he meets his students where they are: “It was difficult to figure out how to take a science experiment and teach it virtually. So I went to social media. I created TikToks that showed different versions of the experiment and they were able to follow those. Now that they follow me, when I post something it will pop up on their news feeds.”