OpenSciEd Absent Student Support Strategies

Absent Student Support

Strategies

It can be a significant challenge for students to catch up on missed lessons, even if they have only been absent for one day. Students may have missed crucial discussions or activities that are vital for their understanding. Some days of instruction are more challenging than others to catch up on. Instructional days involving investigations or discussions that require the participation of their peers, can be especially difficult. Complicating matters further, students cope with absences differently, with factors such as shyness, fear of judgment, overwhelm, or social-emotional issues affecting their ability to catch up. Not surprisingly, it becomes more challenging to help students catch up on missed lessons when they have been absent for several days or even a week.

This guide offers crowd-sourced supportive strategies for absent students gathered from educators globally who utilize OpenSciEd materials in their teaching. We are grateful for the collaborative problem-solving we are able to engage in with educators as we work together to improve science learning for all students. The names of the contributing educators can be found throughout this document.

This guide is organized into the following sections:

● Types of learning activities and their impact on absent students

● General strategies for supporting absent students

● Make-up videos for Lesson 1 of OpenSciEd units

Absent Student Support Strategies

Types of Learning Activities and their Impact on Absent Students

Type of Learning

Goal of Learning

Unit Launch - Anchoring Phenomenon Routine

Elicits curiosity and excitement that drives learning throughout the unit. It provides a common experience with a phenomenon. Students make connections to related phenomena from their life experiences and generate questions to drive the need to figure things out.

How does missing this type of learning negatively impact student understanding?

Type of Learning

Goal of Learning

How does missing this type of learning negatively impact student understanding?

This is a critical component of OpenSciEd units and sets the context for all the learning that follows in a unit. For that reason, it is very important for students to experience this learning. The Anchoring Phenomenon Routine is designed to elicit student knowledge and experience with a phenomenon, draw connections to students’ communities, families, and lives outside of school, and finally generate questions to answers and ideas for investigations. All of these factors support student engagement and motivate learning as the class now has a shared mission to figure out together.

Investigation Routine

The Investigation Routine is the primary routine that students use when they are trying to figure out something or design solutions to a problem. This routine has three elements:

1. Create a Plan of Action

2. Do the Work with Science and Engineering Practices

3. Make Sense: What did we figure out?

Investigations provide an opportunity for students to begin answering questions on the Driving Question Board by using the Science and Engineering Practices and collecting data. Additionally, investigations surface new critical questions that motivate continued learning.

Absent Student Support Strategies

Continually being absent from investigations will prevent students from having the opportunity to engage with the practices. Doing hands-on investigations is fun and engaging; absent students will miss out on that shared experience. That being said, investigations are often seen as a more accessible type of learning to make up compared to discussion-heavy lessons

Type of Learning

Goal of Learning

Sensemaking Discussions

In this type of discussion, we share, connect, critique, and build on others’ findings, claims, evidence, and explanations as we collectively work towards a common (class-level) explanation or model. This includes capturing the areas of agreement for which the class has evidence, as well as areas where the class still disagrees and might need further evidence

These discussions provide the teacher and students with an opportunity to clarify which aspects of the questions and problems the class has identified have been addressed and which need further investigation.

How does missing this type of learning negatively impact student understanding?

When a student misses a sensemaking discussion, it can impact content understanding as well as classroom culture. Discussions provide students with an opportunity to bring their explanations to the group as a whole and contribute to a shared collective model or explanation. Missing this means that a student didn’t have the opportunity to make new connections in their understanding, build on the ideas of others, or identify areas of uncertainty The student also misses out on a communal activity and may feel left out and excluded.

Absent Student Support Strategies

Type of Learning

Goal of Learning

Summative Assessments

Obtain evidence of what students have learned to

1. provide them with information on where they are in their learning (compared to where they need to be)

2 provide teachers with information to adjust future instruction and often assign a grade Summative assessments can be transfer tasks where students are asked to make sense of a new phenomenon. They can also be final models and arguments or explanations of the phenomenon explored in the class. Either way, summative assessments should be closely linked to the targeted performance expectations and directly address concepts and practices that the unit focuses on developing and using.

How does missing this type of learning negatively impact student understanding?

It is important to provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned and it is often an important point for communicating student understanding as a grade. Since these assessments are individual, it is easier to imagine how to make up this learning without greatly impacting the flow of classroom learning It is important that a student is not missing the launch of a new unit in order to make-up an assessment from a previous unit. That would negatively impact their experience with the new unit.

Absent Student Support Strategies

General Strategies for Supporting Absent Students

Strategy

Daily Summary Videos

Description

Make a quick video at the end of the day summarizing what happened in the day. When possible, it is recommended to make a video whether or not there are students absent. The videos are useful for other purposes including students who are confused or sharing with support staff.

Daily Summary Video - Absent Student Strategies

From Lisa Camponeschi, Pilgrim Park Middle School

Recorded Investigation Videos

Create a Recap Video

Daily Log

Create a bank of videos that show students the investigations that happen in the classroom so that they can engage in the lesson even if they are absent.

Investigation Videos - Absent Student Strategies

From Chuck Hickey from East Weymouth, MA

Make a quick video at the end of the day summarizing what happens in the day.

Recap Video - Absent Student Strategies

From Patty Lin-Celeste from Saint Paul, MN

Create a running digital document that has a summary of what happened in every class. Encourage students to read the daily log if they are absent or if they need to review the content. This also provides a helpful record of all of the learning for the year and gives you an opportunity to use it for planning and pacing in future school years This can also serve as a helpful tool for the class as a whole to look back on where we have been to motivate where we are going next.

Daily Class Log - Absent Student Strategies

From Koreen Corbett from San Marcos, CA

Absent Student Support Strategies

Community Norms

Google Classroom Resources

Slides & WAG

Summary Emails

The OpenSciEd Classroom Norms recommend focusing on the following:

● Respectful - Our classroom is a safe space to share.

● Equitable - Everyone’s participation and ideas are valuable.

● Committed to our community - We learn together

● Moving our science thinking forward - We work together to figure things out

In a classroom that is committed to these norms, the community as a whole is responsible for making sure that an absent student is both caught up and that their ideas are added to our current thinking. These community norms can be leveraged to support absent students.

Community Norms - Absent Student Strategies

From Brandi Criminger from Oklahoma City, OK

Google Classroom can be a useful resource for organizing classroom materials and sharing them with absent students. This is a great place to capture artifacts from the classroom including posters, whiteboard drawings, investigations, and data. Many of these strategies can be used with any learning management system.

Google Classroom Resources - Absent Student Strategies

From Gretchen Brinza from Louisville, CO

Classroom-facing slides can be modified into interactive slides for students who were absent. Organizing all the classroom materials in a Week-at-a-Glance (WAG) helps students who were absent know what they missed and what needs to be made up.

Slides & WAG - Absent Student Strategies

From Mary Chapluk from Yorba Linda, CA

Writing a summary email for students who were absent can be useful for describing what happened in class and assigning work. It also allows for a personal connection and touch point

Absent Student Support Strategies

with an absent student. These emails do not need to be polished, and they can be sent to a group of absent students rather than individually.

Summary Emails - Absent Student Strategies

From Rachel Kagan from Paradise, CA

1:1 Meeting with Students

Recorded Discussions

Student Summary of the Discussion

Making time to meet with an absent student can be an impactful investment of time. It allows for a personal connection, and the teacher can summarize the learning that was missed and identify what types of support the student will need to be able to reintegrate into the unit learning.

Discussions are difficult learning experiences to recreate because they are so fluid and unpredictable. One strategy that can be helpful is to record the discussions so that they can be referred back to by students or the teacher Many pieces of technology now help with capturing classroom discussions, or you can assign a student to be the videographer for the day or the unit. Be mindful of student privacy and where/how these recordings are stored and shared.

Have a student create a summary of the discussion and what was shared and how the thinking evolved over time. This could be typed, recorded, or in another format. This should be a role that is assigned before the discussion so that the student can pay attention and take notes to help inform their summary. This role should be a rotating responsibility and could potentially be shared by a small team rather than an individual.

Absent Student Support Strategies

Make-up Videos for Lesson 1 of OpenSciEd Units

Missing the first lessons of an OpenSciEd unit can have negative effects on the student learning for the remainder of the unit. Included below are make-up videos for a sample of OpenSciEd units. We will be gathering feedback and will explore the possibility of making these videos for Lesson 1 of all our units if these prove to be a helpful and utilized resource for teachers and students. The videos are meant to be interactive and ask students to pause and complete different pieces of work. Students can watch the entire video or just the section that they were absent for.

B.1 B.1

C.1

P.1

P.1 Absent Student Support Video