Transitions happen. As we start back to school this year, we need to help our students understand and prepare for change. Join us as we welcome our special guest, Amini Onowho—a PreK–2 teacher in an Inclusion/Sheltered English Immersion classroom in Boston, Massachusetts—to discuss how we might begin the school year by slowing down to take the time to build a classroom culture where our young students enjoy the learning process. Amini shares with the team how to recognize the external and internal factors that may impede a child's social, emotional, and academic development as well as her strategies for navigating the transition back to school this year with her young learners. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

This year, you may know less about what happened in the previous school year. As you start to build relationships with students, it's important to ask questions about what they did learn—framing it as a desire to be a more effective teacher. Join us this week as we meet Tina Y. Gourd, a professor in the College of Education at the University of Washington. Tina helps us reframe assessment by looking at it through the lens of teacher agency in rearticulating education and nurturing social change to positively impact students' educational experience. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

At the start of an academic year, we know that our students will return to us after the summer break with some gaps in their learning. The approach that we recommend to engage students in the learning process is to think about how we might accelerate learning, which emphasizes a proactive and positive mindset. Join us this week as we discuss how to develop a student-centered approach to accelerate learning and develop opportunities to foster student agency with our special guest: 8th grade language arts, social studies, and AVID Elective teacher, Danielle Reyes. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

This week, Danielle Reyes—8th grade language arts, social studies, and AVID Elective teacher—joins the team once again to share ideas on how to connect with students to build classroom community in order to accelerate learning this school year. In this episode, we spend time digging deep into relationship-building strategies, sharing practical and easy-to-implement best practices you can use with your students this school year. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

As we start to return to full-time, in-person teaching, we wanted to take a moment to process the experiences of COVID on us and our students. We have begun to hear conversations centered around the question, "What are your takeaways from pandemic teaching and learning?" This inquiry assumes that everyone has had the opportunity to reflect on their experiences, which may not be the case during the flurry of activity that accompanies the end of the school year. Join us and our special guest, Danielle Reyes—an AVID Elective and 8th grade language arts, social studies teacher—as we reflect on the past year and the best practices from remote teaching that we will incorporate into the face-to-face classroom. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

Many teachers and their students will be going back to face-to-face learning. Join us to explore how we can leverage transitions this year to focus on accelerating learning. We talk about how we can flip the deficit mindset associated with "learning loss" to reframe how we engage students with language that reinforces their self-worth, confidence, and self-motivation. To inspire and motivate students to move forward, we need to take advantage of these transitions to build them up, partner with them, and help them believe that they will succeed. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

In the second episode of this series, we discuss how to create classrooms where students can focus on learning because they have built relationships and routines with social and emotional learning protocols that help them shift away from the survival-brain focus they have carried for the past 18 months. Our team of educators share their diverse experiences in helping students build comfort and familiarity with each other so that they can try something new. We explore the importance and grace of failure because it is through failure that we remember and come to own our learning by examining our mistakes. We also define the survival brain and the steps that we as educators can take to help shift our students into the learning brain this year. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

As you plan and organize your back-to-school preparations, we wanted to explore the role of transitions with a three-part series that examines how social and emotional learning can help you and your students prepare for the new school year after a year of disruption. In this episode, we focus on how we as adults need to work on our self-regulation and learn to be kind to ourselves as we prepare for the unknowns that will accompany the school year. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

In this week's episode, we celebrate our students and what they have accomplished during this past year. We meet with Andrew Hoggard, a graduating senior from Washington, who shares with us the challenges he and his fellow students faced, their accomplishments, and the lessons they have learned that they will carry forward as they continue on the path toward future readiness. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

In May, we asked listeners to share their stories from a year of pandemic teaching. In this episode, we celebrate teachers by sharing your insights and lessons learned. We hear from Kimberly Boyer, a 7/8 Pre-Algebra and Algebra Teacher at VandenBerge Middle School; Shartresa Nixon, an AVID Elective and AVID Excel Teacher at the United for Success Academy; and Liz Buffington, a Learning Designer at AVID Center. Join us to learn from each of our guests, as they share their challenges and their techniques for sharing the joy in the work, despite the struggles and stress of this past year. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.