A System for Meeting Absent Students’ Needs (and Everyone Else’s Too)

Listen to the interview with Robert Barnett:

Sponsored by Boclips Classroom and Zearn

This page contains Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org?

In the very first minute of my first day teaching at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, DC, I received a rude awakening. My first period class was pre-calculus. There were 21 students on my roster. But when I took attendance, there were only about 10 students in class. I looked at my carefully prepared introduction lesson and realized that half my students would miss it. “Oh well,” I thought, “I guess I should give the lesson anyway.”

So I started the lesson. But every few minutes, another student walked in. Not only did each successive arrival disrupt my class, but it also gave me a difficult choice. Should I stop what I was doing to get the new student settled? Or should I just keep moving, and hope the new student would catch on?

This happened several times during my first period class. So by the end of the period:

• 10 students had seen the full lesson. 
• Five or six students had seen various parts of the lesson. 
• Another five or six students hadn’t seen any at all. 

One thing was clear: It was the first day of school, and many of my students had already fallen behind.

I hoped that this would just be a start-of-school anomaly. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. In fact, as the year went on, it got worse! Some days there would only be three or four students in class at the first bell, and maybe 10 by the end. I was frustrated — I constantly had to interrupt and/or repeat myself — and my students were too. 

And every day, I had to ask myself: If some students missed class today, and others would miss class tomorrow, how could I possibly ensure that every student truly learns?

The Pedagogical Challenge of Absenteeism 

Chronic absenteeism is a huge — and growing — problem. In 2018, approximately 15 percent of American students were considered chronically absent; in 2022, that number had risen to 28 percent. Rates of absenteeism have started to come back down since then, but are still far above pre-COVID levels.

There has rightly been a lot of attention devoted to this problem. There are outstanding reports from places like Future Ed and the Learning Policy Institute on strategies that schools and districts can take to improve attendance, and nonprofits such as Attendance Works do heroic work to help schools improve attendance.

Little of that attention, however, has focused on a key question facing every teacher: What should I do when absent students actually return to class?

If you’ve ever been a teacher, you know how hard this is. A student who misses Monday’s lesson won’t be fully prepared when she shows up on Tuesday… but if you repeat the prior lesson when that student arrives, your students who were in class on Monday will be bored. You can try to summarize Monday’s lesson at the start of class on Tuesday — a little review never hurt anyone — but it’s doubtful that a little review will be enough to get your previously absent students caught up. 

There are, of course, things you can try to help absent students. You can send home make-up work packets, or ask students to get notes from their friends, or even stay after school to help students catch up. But make-up packets can’t replace actual lessons — if students could just learn from make-up packets, there would be no point in attending school — and getting a friend’s notes is rarely enough either. Chronically absent students often face challenges in their lives that make completing this kind of make-up work even harder. And while it’s nice to stay after school, neither teachers nor students may be able to do that regularly.

So chronically absent learners come back to class, hoping to learn. But if they’ve missed prior lessons, they may be lost when they arrive. And if you have new lessons to teach, you may struggle to help them catch up. This is a challenge facing millions of teachers and students every day.

Fortunately, I have a solution. It worked for me at Eastern, it has worked for thousands of educators worldwide, and it can work for you. The best part is that it doesn’t just help chronically absent students. In fact, it helps everyone learn! It can even make your life easier too.

How Digitizing Direct Instruction Helps Absent Students Learn

If you want students who miss class to be able to catch up, you need to make the instruction you provide accessible outside of class. That way, if a student misses class one day, they can easily see what you explained — and come back the next day prepared to learn.

This is easier said than done. But actually, it isn’t very hard! All you really need to do is:

1. Start a video call with yourself.
2. Hit the record button.
3. Explain what you explained during class.
4. End the recording.
5. Share the link with your students.

Once you’ve done this, you have a resource you can share with students whenever they miss class. No matter where a student is, they can watch your video and understand what they need to know. There are lots of things you can do to make your videos more engaging too. Best of all, you never have to repeat that explanation again!

And sometimes, if I ran out of time to record my own video or just wanted a change of pace, I’d find a good video on YouTube instead. I found that my students generally preferred my videos, and I liked making videos because I could explain things in ways I knew my students would understand, but adding variety was always nice.

It’s important to note here that you don’t need to transform your entire classroom or stop teaching the way you’re used to. You can still have engaging whole-class discussions and activities! But by recording your direct instruction on video, you make it possible for chronically absent students to stay on pace.

Once you have videos, however, you might realize that you actually can change the way your class works — and that the students who attend your class might actually benefit too.

Digital Direct Instruction Also Benefits Present Students 

Now, when students return after missing class, it’s easy to make sure they have something appropriately challenging to do. You can simply ask them: “Are you caught up on the videos?”

If they are, they can join your regular lesson. If not — and if you have computers in your room — you can simply ask them to get on a computer and pick up where they last left off. And once they’ve caught up, they can rejoin the rest of the class.

Once you’re doing this, however, you might realize that it isn’t just your previously absent students who benefit from digital direct instruction. For instance:

• Your advanced students, who already understand the content of your daily lesson, might want to watch videos covering new content.
• Your students with learning gaps, who struggle to understand your lesson even if they have been present in class, might want to review prerequisite skills they have missed.
• Rather than trying to keep all of your students following along with the same lesson — which some already understand, and others aren’t yet prepared to understand — you might like to walk around your classroom, building relationships and answering questions while your students control their own learning.

You might realize, in fact, that teaching one lesson at a time to all of your students isn’t the best way for any student to learn. Some students will inevitably be ahead, other students will inevitably be behind, and others will inevitably be absent. Each of these learners needs different things! If you digitize direct instruction, you can spend your time in class providing every student with the support they actually need.

And this doesn’t mean that students will spend all of class on their devices. Far from it! Research shows that the best instructional videos are short (under 6 minutes) and focused. So your students can watch your videos, take notes, and spend most of their time working together to apply what they’ve learned. In fact, they’ll actually have more time to work together, because you won’t need to interrupt your explanations in order to answer questions or manage behavior.

So if you don’t have to transform your classroom around instructional videos, they can just be a tool you use to help students catch up. But if you want to stop lecturing, spend more of your time working closely with students, and give your students control over their own learning, digitizing your direct instruction makes it possible to keep all of your students — no matter their attendance history — engaged at once.

My Students’ Lives Became Easier – and Mine Did Too

Before I started creating videos, my first-period precalculus class was a nightmare. I was frustrated when my students missed class and frustrated when they came back. I’m sure my students noticed that, and they probably dreaded my class too.

Once I had my videos ready, however, my day-to-day stress disappeared. It didn’t matter if a student was absent yesterday, or another student arrived midway through class: I could welcome my students warmly to class, then simply ask each one to pick up where they last left off. I didn’t have to police the behavior of students who were ahead and bored, or behind and lost. I spent class time getting to know my students, and giving each young person the support and encouragement they actually needed. And best of all, I could ensure that every student actually understood each lesson before moving on to the next.

Every student was appropriately challenged — and appropriately supported — every day.

That doesn’t mean that teaching was easy. Mastering new content is challenging, as it should be! (That’s why kids need teachers.) I wanted each of my students to learn as much precalculus as possible, despite the attendance challenges they faced, and I had to make hard choices about what content to prioritize and how much autonomy to provide. Keeping a classroom full of self-directed students organized and on track required strong systems that took me time, trial, and error to develop. My instructional videos, in fact, were just the first step towards creating a Modern Classroom that met every learner’s needs.

But those simple videos were a critical first step — and they showed all of my learners, whether they attended class regularly or not, that mine was a class in which they could succeed. They made teaching and learning fun, too.

Next Steps For You

I think of instructional videos kind of like curb cuts on sidewalks: by making your instruction more accessible to the chronically absent students who need that access the most, you can actually create a classroom in which students at all levels of attendance and understanding can thrive.

You just need to create those videos first!

And I know that can seem intimidating. It sure seemed that way to me, and it has been a challenge for many of the thousands of educators that I’ve now seen implement the Modern Classroom model in their own classrooms.

But if you’re an educator in the first place, then I know you’re up for a challenge. And if you can join a video call, then you can record a video that helps your absent students — as well as your present students — learn. 

I hope you’ll give it a try!

Robert Barnett is holding a drawing for a free giveaway for his book, Meet Every Learner’s Needs. By signing up here, you will receive a free digital preview of the book and be entered into a drawing for a free signed copy!

The post A System for Meeting Absent Students’ Needs (and Everyone Else’s Too) first appeared on Cult of Pedagogy. Catching up absent students never seems to get easier. Here’s an approach that might work.
The post A System for Meeting Absent Students’ Needs (and Everyone Else’s Too) first appeared on Cult of Pedagogy. Classroom Management, Instruction, Podcast, differentiation, teaching strategies, teaching with tech Cult of Pedagogy