Concerned about how young children will adapt to learning in the new COVID19 times? Elementary Principal, and mother of 2 little ones herself, Megan Kümmerlin talks about how we are prepared to make the learning experience meaningful, productive and safe for all.
As we plan for our opening school year of 2020-2021 and beyond United Lisbon is committed to reaching our vision to empower and inspire the younger generation for a sustainable world. In all our plans we hold true to our vision, mission, and values. We will keep our class sizes between 10-18 students in each grade. Students will be able to learn in our spacious newly renovated campus because of the reduced building occupancy. Students will attend all core and specialist classes (Art, Music, PE, and World Languages). Lastly, a priority in all our learning plans is to foster the home and school partnership.
Our leadership team designed comprehensive plans for different scenarios that allow us to adapt to COVID-19 updates in order to ensure we make the learning experience meaningful, productive, and safe for all. We believe learning should be an active, contextualized, and constructive process for students that allows them to grow academically, socially, and emotionally. If we were to go to online learning, we do not believe that it is a long-term replacement of regular school, but a temporary necessity to keep our students, staff, and families safe and healthy.
Our modern pedagogy creates a student-centered learning ecosystem that instills relevant skills through guided-inquiry, collaborative learning, and seamless integration of technology, to strengthen and further personalize the learning experience of each individual student. We believe it is important to develop our students’ values of heart, vision, integrity, and determination.
Students will progress in the curriculum through active participation in synchronous and/or asynchronous lessons in all subjects depending on your family’s location and situation. Our teachers are experts at distance learning and will cultivate a positive and inclusive online learning environment that is differentiated to meet the needs of each student. In addition, there will be a focus on developing students’ curiosity and creativity, communication, compassion and caring, a sense of community and context.
Relationships play an essential role in every student’s school experience. A foundation of our distance learning plan is to build strong connections with students and families. Students from K3-Grade 9 will have a plethora of opportunities to collaborate with peers, receive meaningful feedback from their teachers and classmates, and build relationships in their community. In the Elementary, teachers will have regular check-ins with families to support students and parents in the online learning model. In Middle School and High School, students will have home room advisors that will be the liaison between school and home.
Technology has become an integral part of our lives and of the learning process. We have purposefully designed specific technology tools to enhance the learning process at United Lisbon in the COVID-19 pandemic. Our distance learning will enable individual learning pathways; enrich learning through global interconnectedness and seamless communication; and instill new skills and values such as for digital literacy and citizenship. We are proud to be a candidate Microsoft showcase school and will utilize Office 365 as a learning platform. In Middle (Grade 6-8) and High (Grade 9) school we will use Microsoft Teams for collaboration, meetings, assessment, and feedback. In the Elementary (PK3-Grade 5) we have chosen Seesaw, a digital portfolio app, to streamline the learning for our youngest learners. Both methods allow for open communication between teachers and students, parents and teachers, and student to student.
We appreciate our United Lisbon community and look forward to building a school that matters tomorrow. As our opening approaches we will provide specific information about the pathway we will take.
