Changing Mind-Sets
When designing a school based on students’ needs, you do things a lot
differently than how it’s done in traditional schools. What I tried to do with
staff was to put us in the mode of parenting or grandparenting. If you start to
think as a parent or grandparent about how to do things, you get different
results than you would as a teacher, an administrator, or a legislator; it
becomes personal all of a sudden. When my kids were nearing the end of a
class, what I wanted more than anything was for them to know the material
so that they would be able to go on to the next level. When we traditionally
grade our students, we penalize them for what they don’t know at a specific
moment in time. By the time their Algebra I class ends, they could know
everything but still end up with a D because they have low grades trailing
behind them from tests they took when they didn’t yet understand the
material. When setting up FLVS, we recognized that the “we taught it, but
they chose not to learn it at the time” paradigm needed to change, and so we
allow students to resubmit work. We want our students to actually know the
material, so we give them the opportunity to resubmit their work and
improve their grade. If they don’t pass Chapter 1, they don’t go on to
Chapter 2.
The learning at FLVS is individualized; students can enroll any day of the
year and complete their course any day of the year. They can work anytime
they choose to—they can even do their entire class on Saturdays and
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Sundays if they like. Some students do all of their work on campus if they
don’t have computer access at home; other students don’t do any of their
work on campus. Our teachers are available from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.,
five days a week, and are also available on weekends. There’s flexibility
built in because they are evaluated strictly on their results, so they may
choose to work all day on a Saturday or go to the beach with visiting
relatives on a Thursday afternoon. And that’s okay because at 7:00 p.m. that
night, their IM’s going to start and they’re going to be working with students
for the next three hours or into the wee hours of the night. And that’s
exactly what they sign up for. Every teacher is trained on how to personalize
instruction because this is something high school teachers have not been
taught. The best way to do that is to bring in kindergarten teachers, because
when you put high school teachers in an environment where students can
start any day of the year and finish any day of the year, and it’s all about
where that student is today, most will say it can’t be done. Then I tell them
about my favorite kindergarten teacher, who has nine groups of students
that change every week based on what each student knows on Friday.
We engage in monthly conferences with parents and students. A parent gets
a call every single month, whether there’s a particular challenge to discuss or
whether it’s just to say, “Hey, your child’s doing a great job.” Their first
reaction is usually, “Oh my gosh, why are you calling me? What did she
do?” but by the third month, they’ve stopped worrying. An important part of
these monthly conferences consists of what we call discussion-based
assessments with students. We’ve got many ways of keeping students
honest—turnitin.com, test banks, course monitoring—but after thirteen
years, we’ve found that the only way to really know whether they’re doing
the work is to have regular conversations with them.
It is a myth that virtual schools are only for home-educated or alternative
students. Virtual schools are for all students—those who have scheduling
conflicts, those who need to work, those who need to make up a credit,
those who come in as seniors from out of state and realize that they need a
graduation requirement, those who can’t get a particular course in their
school. Every student in the state of Florida now has access to a highquality,
Advanced Placement program because of FLVS. Part of the design
was to level the playing field so that learning in Florida was not about zip
codes. We do a lot of listening. We do a lot of asking. We give out customer
surveys: to kids, parents, schools, counselors—anybody who will give us
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feedback, because we want to make corrections if need be. One hundred
percent of the school districts in the state of Florida indicate that FLVS is a
huge benefit to their districts. Now, interestingly enough, we still have some
districts that choose not to use us as much as they might/should, but they
still believe that it’s a huge advantage to their districts. In Florida, there’s
actually a law that states, “Students cannot be denied access to Florida
Virtual School unless there’s an educationally sound reason.”
Communication and Transparency
We are constantly looking at data—not just data that have to do with grades
and test scores but data on students that we gather from their families
through conversations. We teach everyone in