LARAEC Student Connect Webinar Series
Submitted By: Michele Stiehl
Los Angeles Regional Adult Education Consortium
Website: https://laraec.org/whatsnextla/studentconnect/
Type of Practice: Program Development / Curriculum / Classroom
Program Area(s): ABE / ASE, ESL / EL Civics / Citizenship, CTE / Workforce Prep / Pre-apprenticeship, Adults with Disabilities, K12 Success
Region: Los Angeles Basin
Consortia Involved: Los Angeles Regional Adult Education Consortium
The Program of Practice
Comprehensive Program Overview:
The LARAEC Student Connect Webinar series brings high-quality content directly to students and classrooms in all CAEP program areas. This event leverages the power of the consortium to target the Equity and Program Development CAEP state priorities. Through the development of an innovative new program, LARAEC addresses student and staff high priority needs through online zoom interactive sessions open to all learners across the consortium. The inaugural session was hosted by an inter-district team of counselors providing a session on school and community-based support services. This session was 30 minutes and was conducted for both day and evening classes in both English and Spanish. Over 1200 people attended this event live on zoom, including teachers, classes, and individual students. Participants attended simultaneously from all member-districts. This webinar series will continue every semester with a new high priority topic.
The Problem(s) of Practice:
Our three-year and annual planning surveys for students and staff indicated:
1) Connecting students with support services is a moderate or high priority (92%)
2) Staff would like more resources and services that they can use to guide students facing challenging circumstances (56%).
3) More counseling for students providing resources for food, shelter, and mental health (42%)
4) Student surveys indicated that only 2-7% of students accessed campus student support services related to mental health, food support, or financial assistance.
The Response
As part of the LARAEC three year and annual plans, we created the Student Connect Webinar Series. This is an ongoing series for presentations focused on high interest topics to students. The planning team identified critical areas for student support such as mental health resources, food and housing insecurity, financial literacy, on-campus student services, community-based services, tenants’ rights, workers’ rights, immigration and naturalization, undocumented student resources, and transportation. The intent of this series was to reach students and staff directly.
The LARAEC Special Populations Action Planning Team was tasked with developing the first webinar on student support services. This session focused on: what are support services? How can they help you? Do you know how to find them or who to ask? Join us on Thursday April 18th to get the information you need! You will receive links and information about resources to help you. They include financial, employment, transportation, and housing resources as well as programs to help you if you have a low income or need help with food.
The Unique Features of the Program
The uniqueness of this program lies in its ability to provide access to high value information across all member-districts, all schools, classrooms, and independent learners simultaneously. Our model utilizes Zoom to allow teachers to host the webinars as classroom speakers and individual students to participate directly. Our presenters engaged participants in the session through questions and chatbox interaction. This modality allows us to leverage the power of the consortium to bring subject-matter experts to all districts and schools providing equitable access to resources and expertise.
The thirty-minute session length with day and evening options, allowed us to maximize participation and allowed teachers to enhance their lesson plans without disrupting instructional content. Individual logins also allowed independent study students, online classes, and students who preferred translation to participate. The session was conducted simultaneously in English and Spanish. As with all student-facing activities, LARAEC aims to remove barriers to registration and participation by providing links, QR codes, simple processes, one-click entry, and the ability to join a session without pre-registration.
The Student Connect recording, PowerPoint, resources, session brochure, and links were made available on the LARAEC student website at Whatsnext.LA. Teachers who were unable to attend the live session with their classes, were able to show the presentation on another day. Students also had access to all resources and links after the presentation.
This program specifically addresses several high priority areas identified in our three-year planning. Teachers are moderately to highly concerned about student leaving programs (83%), moderately to highly concerns about student persistence and completion (96%) and students indicate need for support services (25-40%). Teachers and counseling have discussed the impact of student personal barriers on their ability to continue in adult education programs. Surveys and discussion groups reflect that teachers often feel helpless in impacting these areas. Teachers feel that helping students with many of the high-interest topics may positively impact attendance, retention, completion and transitions.
The Outcome
We were extremely pleased with this first session. We have over 900 students register for this event. There were 668 participants in the morning session and 650 in the evening session.
• 38% indicated that they attended with their class.
• 25% used language translation.
• 86% would like more events like this.
• 77% would like these events once a quarter or once a semester.
Two post session comments got to the heart of why we created LARAEC Student Connect:
• “I appreciate the content because it addresses my student’ current barriers [and] I don’t know how to help them.”
• One school experienced a breakdown as dozens of students left the session and flooded the office to talk to their counselor about support services.
LARAEC has included Student Connect topics on the next three-year plan student and staff surveys. We will be hosting events like these each semester on high priority topics selected by field-based staff and students. Programs like these are easily implemented and replicable for a variety of agencies and focus areas. We utilized this “bring your class to an online event” model for our very successful LARAEC Edge Conference. The best parts about online student events like this is the ability to broadcast live to a huge audience across a wide area, the cost-effectiveness of sharing a single speaker to hundreds of classrooms, and utilizing zoom to make these events free and accessible to all participants. Other consortia, that may not have the resources of LARAEC, can still provide these kinds of events.