Salt Creek School District 48 will begin the 2020-21 school year in an eLearning model. The eLearning model allows students to continue their District 48 education away from their brick and mortar school. Instruction combines synchronous (in person with educator) and asynchronous (self determined pace and time) sessions with teachers and classmates via virtual tools/devices. In addition, instruction  will include online lessons and self-paced activities to engage students and create personalized learning experiences to meet students’ needs. This eLearning experience is designed to be more rigorous and provide more live learning opportunities than the remote eLearning experiences  from the spring of 2020. Students will be expected to be available for learning sessions throughout the school day and grading practices will align to D48 procedures.

We would like all teachers to focus their efforts on routines, SEL, and digital literacy the first several weeks of school. We must recognize our students have been out of school for an extended period of time and we must honor this by focusing on their mental, emotional, and academic wellbeing.

The need for resilience, critical and creative thinking, thoughtful responsiveness, and empathy to help ensure that each and every student continues to grow personally, academically, social emotionally, and linguistically. 

• Do not go “back to basics” to meet student needs

• Go deeper into essential standards

• Support the whole child, academically and social emotionally 

• Prioritize mini-lessons

• Prioritize small group instruction to allow all students to engage in the learning process

• Remain flexible with pacing and student assignments

• Prioritize cycles of inquiry through meaningful long-term projects with benchmarks and personalized feedback

• Be mindful of screen time for students during eLearning, especially for our youngest students

The first several weeks will focus on relationships, routines, and getting our students back into the concept of school. Supporting the whole child by attending to students’ well-being, safety, social-emotional, and behavioral health, will be imperative. This should include, but not be limited, to the following:

• Provide students with appropriate strategies to help them process events, such as providing them factual information, assigning journaling, and facilitating morning meetings/healing circles

• Establish predictable routines

• Provide ongoing communication between staff and caregivers

• Utilize school and community resources to provide mental health supports

Morning Meeting Framework: During our daily, 15-minutes sessions on SEL our focus will be relationship building, creating emotional safety, and providing students a sense of belonging in a remote setting. During these sessions the teacher will look to engage portions of the class during each session, ensuring every child will get the chance to participate throughout the week.

The evaluation of students' work and academic performance reported on an ongoing and summative basis. It is important to keep in mind that students can learn without grades, yet they cannot learn without formative assessment and feedback. 

• The use of formative assessments should be the primary means of determining if a child is making progress towards the Essential Learning Standards for a particular unit of study.

• Focus on providing feedback. Feedback should be actionable and specific.

  • Actionable: provides students with something they can do to improve 

  • Specific: students know what improvement is needed

• Students will once again be receiving traditional grades.