Key To Student Success: Learning Coach Engagement

Omaha Virtual School is a unique educational experience for students, parents, and teachers. First of all, we call our parents learning coaches. Our learning coaches work with their students and OVS teachers facilitate our students' education. Our students spend more time with their learning coaches than with our teachers, which is why the learning coach role is so vital. Equally as vital is the communication and connection between teachers and learning coaches. These conversations need to be student-centered on student's skills, strengths, areas of concern, and interests. There are so many research studies that support the importance of parent connection with the school in traditional, brick and mortar schools, but this importance is triple in our at OVS.

The biggest barrier we face as a school community is how to connect with learning coaches to support their efforts at home. Our main forms of connection are through our weekly newsletters and emails. It is imperative that learning coaches arm themselves with this information. Additionally, we offer learning coach trainings while students are in class with teachers, once per week. These topics range from educational technology resources, CommonSense Media digital citizenship trainings, and more. This semester we will make the shift to provide trainings that will support our learning coaches in the area of educational strategies and practices at home with literacy and math strategies. 

One way we are working towards making that shift this semester is with our Math Clubs on Monday afternoons at 1:30, where we will work with students on math skills while we train parents on math instructional strategies. However, we need to ensure that learning coaches are engaging in these trainings in order for our efforts to have an impact on student math growth. We will continue to strategize on how we can better coordinate training efforts for learning coaches, whether it is during different times of the day or online. Either way, the key  to our student's success is parent engagement. 

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If you are interested, here is a link to a variety of studies about the impact of parent engagement on student achievement: https://www.familiesandschools.org/blog/the-importance-of-parent-engagement/. ​