In this interview, Roxanne Howman, a first grade teacher for the Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy (OHDELA), shares how she successfully implements the Caring School Community program in a completely virtual learning environment.
“Caring School Community has shed a new light on how I had been approaching the social-emotional aspect of my classroom. While I firmly believe that I have been effectively building relationships with my students, this curriculum has brought to my attention that it’s equally important to teach a child how to be part of a society.”
Tell us a little about yourself, your school and district, and the students that you serve.
Hello. My name is Roxanne Howman. I’ve been an elementary school teacher for approximately 10 years. While my professional teaching career began around 2014 teaching at a brick-and-mortar school in New Port Richey, Florida, I’ve worked with children of various age groups and backgrounds in other capacities.
Examples of this include working in pre-school programs, teaching and directing dance and drama teams, volunteering in Head Start programs. Also, serving as a Girl Scout leader, teaching Sunday School for 11 years, and volunteering in orphanages in other countries.
Additionally, to give my students rewarding and life changing experiences, I took my dance and drama team to participate in programs for kids with parents that are incarcerated, and we performed meaningful dramas in domestic violence shelters to help inspire hope and empower children and their families to begin to heal. We went as far as Mexico to help encourage children living in orphanages and to those who have families who are living on the streets.
I currently teach first grade for OHDELA, which is an online school serving the state of Ohio. We service a variety of students across the state with varied homelives in terms of cultural background, financial stability, parental experience, and parental participation in education.
What is the most rewarding part of being an educator for you?
Simply put, when one of my students reads a book by themselves for the first time is the most rewarding part of being a teacher.
Simply put, when one of my students reads a book by themselves for the first time is the most rewarding part of being a teacher.
What do you especially enjoy about your current role?
I enjoy collaborating with our learning coaches to find the most effective methods of transferring knowledge to the child they’re developing.
Our learning coaches are typically parents, grandparents, or sometimes even other invested adults such as aunts or uncles. We collaborate with them on a regular basis, as they sit alongside the child during the online learning sessions.
Coaches are provided easy access to us (the teachers) via email, phone calls, and text. I also permit their participation in our Live Sessions via the public and private chat boxes.
This ongoing conversation with the child’s learning coach creates a powerful framework. It promotes more effective and enjoyable knowledge transfer while developing relationships between all participants (student, coaches and teachers alike). Allow me to share an example of this, which moved me on an emotional level.
Do you have any examples you could share?
Last year, while working for ODHELA, I had a first-grade student who was shy and not participating at the beginning of the year. I will give this student a pseudonym of “Sam.”
Sam’s mother was very concerned as her child struggled to grasp the fundamentals of reading. To help Sam find her way, both her mother and grandmother took turns participating in every live class, small group, and progress monitoring session without fail (even when Sam was not feeling well).
The three of us worked with Sam every day through the balance of the year to build her knowledge of phonemic awareness, phonics knowledge, word building, segmenting, blending sounds and many other skills essential to reading.
Toward the end of the year, during one of our regular progress monitoring sessions, Sam read a passage from one of our decodable readers, beautifully, for the first time (without prompting). Grandma, Mom, and I shared tears of joy as we witnessed this meaningful accomplishment.
Our ODHELA on-line learning platform and methodology lends itself to this type of parental collaboration. This collaboration leads to more effective teaching as well as emotional rewards such as the one I shared with Sam’s parental figures, who were equally invested in her development.
How long have you been implementing Caring School Community?
I have been teaching the Caring School Community curriculum in my online classroom for approximately one year.
In what ways have you modified your instruction of Caring School Community for an online school? What has worked well?
I continually leverage information in the Caring School Community teacher’s manual by finding creative ways to adapt it for use in our virtual setting. For example, I’ve adapted the morning circle concept in my homeroom in the following ways:
- Each day for 5–10 minutes prior to class starting, I play a soothing video and allow the students to exchange greetings in the chat box.
- I play a short, thought-provoking video or use a meaningful photograph related to the topic of the week to drive subsequent conversation.
- I greet the class with all cameras on.
- After I make any announcements, we have a discussion about the topic of the week.
First graders tend to be visual learners, so I appreciate the Caring School Community’s use of pictures, which help to guide the lessons and ideas. To supplement the curriculum, I perform a fair bit of research to find supplemental visual examples to help reinforce the learning topics. Pictures, stories, and videos have sparked wonderful and thoughtful discussions amongst my students. They love them and consequently have learned to express themselves well.
Pictures, stories, and videos have sparked wonderful and thoughtful discussions amongst my students. They love them and consequently have learned to express themselves well.
Some topics we discuss:
- Helpfulness
- Kindness to the World, People, Animals
- Lying
- Honesty
- Bullies
- Compassion
- Empathy
- Respect
- Responsibility
- Speaking up or Not
- Characteristics
- Consequences
- Trustworthiness
- Morals
- Virtues
- Conflict
- Compromise
- Tattling
This list is ever-expanding.
What challenges have you encountered implementing the curriculum virtually?
As an educator, I believe that caring for the whole child requires building relationships. Additionally, in my role at OHDELA, it also means building strong bonds with the child’s learning coaches, which requires earning their family’s trust. Again, relationships.
Practicing the Caring School Community curriculum has shed a new light on how I had been approaching the social-emotional aspect of my classroom.
Practicing the Caring School Community curriculum has shed a new light on how I had been approaching the social-emotional aspect of my classroom.
While I firmly believe that I have been effectively building relationships with my students, this curriculum has brought to my attention that it’s equally important to teach a child how to be part of a society. Fundamental protocol for healthy communication and relationships, which we as adults sometimes assume come hard-wired into our DNA, are actually life skills.
These are skills that must be imparted to our children and students to empower them to live rewarding, productive, and successful lives in society. They must be exercised, polished, and continually developed. When you begin breaking this concept down into something teachable, you find yourself focusing on small but powerful behavioral elements/skills that sum up to higher-level skills.
Basic Skills
Some of the basic skills I focus on in my classroom are:
- How to introduce yourself
- How to greet others
- How to address others in different positions of authority
- How to listen to others (active listening is a skill even we adults could use more practice in)
- Waiting for your turn to speak
- Identifying the right time and way to ask a question
- How to interject in a conversation in a way that isn’t offensive or disruptive, but in a positive participatory way
These basic elements are foundational building blocks to higher-level skills:
- How to communicate with one other
- How to care for one another (empathy)
- How to build meaningful relationships
- How to earn trust and respect from others
A first grader doesn’t inherently know how to participate and not get themselves in trouble for interrupting class. I have 60 children on my roster. I cannot have them all get on the mic at once and say hello to one other and share ideas. It would be chaos!
The all-mighty mute-button is a Godsend, but it can also be a double-edged sword by preventing a number of social/behavioral missteps from occurring in the first place. While this may have slightly reduced the number of gray hairs on my head, without those missteps, we’re missing the continual behavioral corrections that take place in a brick-and-mortar class-room, which is a sort of missed opportunity.
For this reason, I’ve found it necessary to teach these skills proactively rather than reactively.
Please describe an example of a challenge you encountered, what you learned from it, and how you shifted the instruction as a result.
The Partner activities suggested in the Caring School Community’s teacher’s manual were my biggest challenge. They require that the students break up into pairs and have meaningful conversations with a friend.
I teach first grade online. It is not reasonable for me to break them all up into partners to talk because of the accountability factor. I must know what’s happening in my classroom at all times. I cannot monitor multiple breakout rooms at one time.
So, I do my best to teach what it means to have meaningful conversations with a friend in a group setting. This requires a bit of creativity.
Example
One day during morning circle we were discussing the topic of, “what is conflict?” We had discussed what conflict is and what it looks like earlier in the week.
We were now moving into what to do when conflict happens. My goal was to have them come up with some conflict-resolving strategies together by sharing and responding to each other.
I asked my students, “What do you do when there’s a conflict between you and your brother, sister, friend, or other relative? How do you handle it?”
One student said, “I ask Mom for help. Mom handles all my conflicts.”
I responded with, “That’s a good place to start. Our parents are there for us when we have troubles and they can help us know how to handle it, but what happens if Mom is not there? Does anyone have another way to help us resolve a conflict?”
One student said, “My baby sister is always starting something. My dad says, ‘Just walk away!’”
I asked him, “Does that help?”
He responded, “yes … well, sometimes.”
Another student chimed in and said, “When my baby sister starts something, I go into my room, lay on my bed, put a pillow over my head, and scream!”
We all started laughing, even some parents! I asked, “Does that help?” He replied, “It keeps me from getting in trouble!” I was so elated that we were having this delightful exchange.
Finally, another student chimed in, “I lost a tooth last night.” My heart sunk to the floor.
We were having a meaningful conversation with the students adding to it and responding to each other. We were getting closer and closer to finding good strategies!
I had to redirect this little guy and say, “Oh gosh that’s exciting news, but we were talking about conflict. What do you do when you have a conflict starting?”
He said, “I don’t know.” He didn’t know what to say because he was not engaged in our conversation. I will say that he was a new student and was not yet taught about this kind of communication.
I’ve learned that as a teacher, I must serve as a living example of how an attentive and active listener interacts with others. This is a skill that first graders must learn. Teaching this skill requires equal parts of instruction and serving as an example for them to appreciate and emulate.
I believe that is what Caring School Community is all about. It is creating an environment where the kids learn how to communicate with others and find joy in the process; it is creating a space where they feel safe enough to express themselves.
I believe that is what Caring School Community is all about. It is creating an environment where the kids learn how to communicate with others and find joy in the process; it is creating a space where they feel safe enough to express themselves. The Caring School Community curriculum has given me a foundation to work from.
It has been challenging to adapt the processes to an online setting, but I feel that it’s helping me to analyze how I teach and the social dynamics of my classroom. Consequently, I now have more tools in my toolbelt to teach my students how to communicate with one another.
What have you noticed about your students’ learning and engagement? If a particular story from your classroom comes to mind, please share it!
I’ve witnessed my students becoming more active listeners—not just listening to me (the teacher) but listening to each other and engaging in productive dialog and exchanging thoughts and feelings. It can be quite enjoyable to observe. In fact, sometimes the parents jump in and add to the conversation as it feels organic, safe, fun, and often meaningful.
One day as a class, we discussed the news media and social media such as TikTok and YouTube, covering the dangers and the pitfalls of being online and social media.
We started with the basics of online safety and the importance of having a trusted adult with us to help navigate. This led to a more nuanced and delightful conversation about good judgment. I explained to the class that it’s important to understand that not everyone on social media tells the truth. Content creators might have a hidden agenda.
In other words, they might try to change your mind about a topic or get you to buy something. They might try to get you to think like they think. Just because someone posts something doesn’t mean what they say is truth, no matter how convincing they may seem.
This naturally led to the topic of “trusted sources.” How do you determine whether the source of information on social media is one that can be trusted? My students were intrigued by this idea and kept the conversation rolling. One of my students then asked, “Ms. Howman, who can we trust online? How do we know?”
“Good question!” I replied. “For now, ask your parents, grandparents or a trusted adult. It will become easier as you grow up and understand the world a bit more and how different people have different views and agendas. Eventually, you will form your own opinions. Only let good and verified information take root in yourself.”
Suddenly, all the kids wanted to talk to her about who they trust. Examples such as “I ask my mom,” “my grandma helps me” were a common theme. They all wanted to add to the original question.
What sort of growth have you seen in your students since you started using Caring School Community?
I explicitly taught them how to respond to each other by giving them prompts such as, “Now that we had Show and Tell, I would like for you to put your name in the chat box if you’re ready to share one thing that you learned about someone else in the classroom.” I also give them time to ask each classmate a question about what they are sharing.
My favorite prompt is, “We are going to share one thing that you like about one of your classmates.”
That has started a number of rewarding conversations. We all feel warm and fuzzy when we do this activity, and they love to share what they like about each other. I have seen several students go from talking over each other and interrupting each other to responding to each other with interest.
What advice or insights would you share with an educator who is new to Caring School Community?
Be patient and honest with yourself. Be flexible in adapting your teaching style and technique. This is especially important if you’re teaching online. We need to teach our children how to function well in a social environment. We must put consistent daily effort into teaching children how to communicate with each other as well as with adults—enabling them to develop productive, meaningful, and lasting relationships.
At the risk of exposing my age and latent inner hippy, the song “Keep Talking,” by Pink Floyd comes to mind. Communication is one of the fundamental skills required for effective relationship building. Humans require healthy relationships to live happy and productive lives.
If you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs you can intuit how relationships fit into the levels of “Safety and Security,” “Love and Belonging,” and even “Self-Esteem.” Don’t underestimate the significance imparting these skills to your students can have on both the time you spend with them as well as their long-term success.
How has Caring School Community affected or changed your own teaching and learning?
It has changed my outlook on how to teach social-emotional learning in my classroom. It broadened my scope to not just teach students to build a relationship with me, but to teach them how to build relationships with everyone!
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Related:
Learn more about Caring School Community.
Read about another Caring School Community success story: Empathy and Growth at Bayshore School
Discover more about Ohio’s work with other Collaborative Classroom programs: Ohio Readers Succeed with Being a Reader and SIPPS