Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining today's webinar, titled "Nine Ways to Help Students Persist," presented by Christy Reyes. My name is Liberty Van Aten, and I'm the project specialist for the California Adult Education Program Technical Assistance Project. Before we begin today's webinar, I'm just going to go over some general housekeeping.

So there's no need to call in if you have speakers or a headset. And if you can't hear, click on the speaker icon on the top left of your screen. You're going to change a little white speaker to a green speaker. Resources are available. They're located in the Handouts pod at the bottom-right of your screen. You're going to select the file name and then just select Download.

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If you are attending with other colleagues from your site, could you please type in the Chat pod your name and the names of others who are attending, but not necessarily logged in? This is going to help us keep accurate attendance. And as a reminder, this webinar will be recorded. This session will be available on the CalAdultEd website later. And if at any time during this webinar, you need technical support, use the Chat pod to ask for help.

So without further ado, I'm going to hand things over to Mary Ann Thatcher from the American Institutes for Research to introduce our presenter, Christy Reyes, and get things started.

Hi, everyone, and thank you for being with us here this afternoon. I'm happy to introduce Christy Reyes from Miracosta College non-credit ESL. She's the WIOA lead for that department, and she's been an ESL professional and expert for many years and done many conference sessions, presentations, and trainings for other organizations. So you may have seen or know Christy.

She's been working with us here on this topic of persistence, and I'm happy for her to have the opportunity to share some of the things she's learned with you today. So Christy--

Hi, everybody. Welcome. I'm so glad you can make it on this afternoon. Today, we're going to go for nine teaching strategies to help students persist. Some of these you probably know, but our goal is always for you to pick up one new thing at least. So we've got a lot to cover. Let's go ahead and get started.

First, I'd like to know a little bit about you. Who are you? In the general Chat pod, if you can just type in your name, your agency or consortium that you're working with, the location, and let us know if you're a teacher, what you teach, and if you're an administrator, just let us know that. So let's just take a look at who all is here quickly before we get started.

Great, Turlock. Coast Consortium. Well, it looks like we're representing areas all over the states. So I'm so glad you're here. Obviously, this is a topic that we all could work on. Having our students' bodies in the desks is what helps us continue doing what we do. So thanks for introducing. I see some of you are still typing in. Go ahead, if you haven't, and let us know who you are.

So we do have a couple of handouts here. You will see in the bottom-right of your screen a box that says Handouts. And what you do is go ahead and click on the first one, LearnerPersistentStrategies.pdf. Click on it. Select Download. Save it to your Desktop. If it takes you to an outside window, come back to this window.

And once you've had a chance to download both of those handouts, if you could just type done in the Chat pod. So I'll give you a chance to do that, and we'll move on as soon as you let us know if you have actually downloaded both of those handouts.

OK. Jane or Janie-- I'm not sure. Jane is the winner. She was the fastest. Give you about 20 more seconds to do that. And so the Handout pod will be there for the remainder of the time, I believe. So I'm going to go ahead and move on, because we have so many great things we want to tell you today.

So our objectives for today-- by the end of today's session, you should be able to demonstrate your understanding of various teaching strategies that encourage our students' persistence, help students develop goal statements, and also describe ways that encouraging students to persist.

I don't know about you, but I have noticed a certain point in my classes where enrollment drops a little bit. How about you? Is there a particular point in time when attendance drops in your classes? Is it a certain week? Is it a certain point of the term or semester? If you want to type that in, go ahead. And I'll just tell you that if this does happen to you, you shouldn't feel bad. It seems to happen for most adult educators.

In fact, a study in England found that-- the name of the study was "Curbing Adult Student Attrition"-- attendance by adult learners was steady at 70% for the first three weeks of class. And then by the ninth week, the attendance had dropped to 57%. Does that sound familiar to you? I see Sarah says, the spring, when folks are getting jobs. So that's kind of an ironic part of our job is that we're supposed to help people get jobs. But then when they get jobs, they leave our classes. So in a way, we're hurting ourselves and helping ourselves at the same time.

So clearly, what we need to do is engage students during those first three weeks when they could potentially leave our class. So that's just what we need to do from day one is get them involved and get them motivated. So we're going to discuss nine ways we can do this.

Number one, you know this. We all know this. When students feel comfortable, they're willing to take a risk and stick around. So we know that this is true, but why? Let's get to the meat of this. Why is it important to give students opportunities to collaborate and cooperate? What do students gain from this? Obviously, when it's a comfortable place, they're going to stick around. But what else do they gain? If you can go ahead and type in anything that comes to your mind in the Chat pod just below those questions-- I'm sure you have some ideas. So go ahead and type in what you think.

Thank you. Sarah says, confidence. Mutual support. Friendships. They feel included. They begin an investment in their community and their style of learning environments. Language skills. A team or cohort mentality.

So just put yourself in your students' shoes. If you felt that you were studying among a group of people who cared about you and were wondering where you were when you didn't show up, you would probably want to stick around. I think we could all agree with that. A great selling point that we can create buy-in for our students about the times when they're doing collaborative and cooperative activities is they're also getting those very crucial soft skills, things like negotiation, communication, time management, problem-solving, adaptability.

All of these things are different assets they can build and they could actually use when they go to apply for a job when they're asked about their strengths. So that's something you can do. I'm sure that you've had this, as I have. There are usually, every once in a while, a couple of students who really resist working in pairs or groups. So we can create that buy-in and make it known to our students that it's expected that they're going to be working with others. And the reason why, when they go to their jobs, of course, many workplaces in the United States are about the team effort.

So what kind of collaborative and cooperative activities do you do? Go ahead and put in some names. What are some things that you do to help students work together?

Peer editing. Partner checks-- checking the homework, checking the exercise in class before checking as a whole class. Discussing evidence of why they chose the answer that they did. A discussion forum. Building cross-cultural awareness and peer shares. Discussing in groups an opinion. Problem-solving is a great activity, too.

Yeah, there are so many different things. Probably the first day of class, you have some sort of icebreaker, I'm sure. You probably do things like group projects once in a while. Perhaps you have class surveys or interviews, lab partners if you're in the sciences. You mentioned consensus problem-solving scenarios and discussion. Conversation skits-- wonderful.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with activities like information gaps, or I believe you know what think, pair, share is. Games and different activities to review can all be done in ways that are collaborative and cooperative, and build that sense of community that we know keeps students coming to our classes.

So the number two strategy, right from the start, we want to make our expectations for attendance and participation clear. I don't know about you, but at my agency, the first day of class, we provide a printed syllabus. And so on the syllabus, we include the attendance policy. Now, if the enrollment is a little bit low, we maybe bend the rules a little bit because we don't want to go any lower.

But we say, for example, if you have four unexcused absences, you could be dropped from the class. So it's really easy to stay in the class as long as you have good communication with your instructor.

So you want to set up class rules and have that be clear. And a great activity is for students to come up with the class rules or policies during that first day or first week of class. Why would it be good for students to make the rules? Well, then they're setting their own expectations of what they should be doing, so the buy-in would be greater.

So you should definitely discuss in your class what is meant by active participation. And one of the soft skills, again, punctuality. So I usually tell my students-- a lot of them are parents or coming from a job-- if you know you're going to be late everyday, just tell me today and you won't need to tell me again.

But when you are late, you need to excuse that. And so when you come into the class, please don't be disruptive. In the sign-in sheet, put the real time that you actually arrived. And try to be as disruptive as possible. But coming late without any good excuse, that won't work in the workplace, and obviously, we are modeling what students need to know to be successful in their future endeavors as employees.

During that first week or so, I have students sign a contract. Of course, I tell them it's not legally binding or anything like that. But it just is a checklist where they say, yes, I understand that I need to contact the teacher if I'm going to be absent. If I need to be late, I'm going to let the teacher know. This kind of thing. So on the handout, there's actually a sample. So that way, you know that students understand what they need to be doing.

And the very first time that they don't excuse their absence, you can pull out that contract and say, I'm not sure this was exactly clear to you. You checked and you signed your name. Please let me know when you're going to be absent.

So Sarah says, in the remote rural poverty community, there are so many barriers for consistent attendance. Child care is one of the top, we know. Transportation, changes in work schedules of the student or his or her spouse. Yeah. So you need to decide how you're going to formulate that attendance policy. And obviously, Sarah, you need to choose something that's a little bit more lenient, but definitely express to students why you would want them to come on time and come regularly, because we're preparing students for many different roles that they occupy in their communities and their lives.

Again, I already mentioned, but create buy-in for the cooperative and collaborative learning by explaining the reasons. Why are you working with a partner? Why are you working in a small group? So this is something, again, all of these things listed here, things that we can do from the start.

We're now at strategy number three. Do you have students do goal-setting at all in your class? Type like a Y for yes or an N for no. If you do, you're doing the right thing. If you don't, you should explore this. We need to help our students set realistic, measurable goals for their time in our class, and help them make a plan for achieving them.

A lot of students are not familiar with goal-setting, so we need to help them write down their goals and help them come up with an action plan-- steps they will take, a timeline. And not just writing that goal plan at the beginning of the course, but revisiting it periodically so that students can feel that sense of accomplishment if they're getting closer to their goal, or maybe choose an alternate goal or a different path if they're not appropriately getting closer to their goal.

So a little bit more about helping students set appropriate goals. SMART-- who has fast fingers? If you know what the acronym SMART is, go ahead and type that in as fast as you can in the Chat pod. Specific is S. Measurable. Attainable. Specific. Measurable attainable, all in one word. Realistic. And time-bound. Yes.

So most students have never heard of a SMART goal. A lot of them have not. And they come to us sometimes with very broad goals or very far-off goals, or other times, they come with too general of the goal, that we need to help them. Help them break down their goals into manageable things that they can accomplish during the time that they're in our class.

So for example, if an ABE student says, I want to be a nurse, and you do a little more discussion and find out that the student wants to be a registered nurse, an RN, which actually requires a university degree. Well, they're in ABE now. They probably have quite a few years of education to go. So what could we do, not to discourage the student, but help them get on that path of pursuing possibly the occupation of nurse?

Well, we would want to talk to the student about a SMART goal. And maybe we need to have a conversation and find out why that student is interested in this career. So the goal could be simply to learn more about the career of nursing. So what you could do is have a list of questions that you ask the student and help them create a SMART goal like this, with very clear, definable steps, like visit a counselor.

Find out what you need. Do you need a high school diploma, a GED? What are classes that the student could take now in preparation with a clear timeline? Show the student some of the career sites to see what is the labor market demand? Obviously, for nursing, it's high. But what salary could be expected? Is it enough to provide a sustainable living wage for that student? What are the main job duties, the skills needed? Maybe interview someone or job shadow.

Find out what the student will need to enter, perhaps, first a community college nursing program on the career ladder to becoming an RN. Will these courses be transferable to a university? So basically, just helping the student, within the time that they spend with you, explore a little, because that goal of becoming a nurse is way off. But this could be something that really actually helps students know if that's an attainable goal for them, a realistic goal.

So we don't just walk away from the student and say, well, that's a long ways off. I can't help you with that. But we can help them. And then every time that we're teaching something in our class that would give more information about that career or help the student develop skills that would be needed in that career, we need to point that out to the student.

So here's another goal. This student has the goal of passing the GED math exam, because he or she wants to attain a high school diploma by the end of the school year. So this is wonderful. The student already has an end date in sight. Now, I don't know how many of you teach GED math, or GED in general, but any of us could think of a couple of steps that we could suggest to this student.

So go ahead and type in the Chat pod, what is one thing that you would suggest to this student to help this student attain the goal of passing the GED math exam?

OK, Andrea, yes. An appointment with a counselor, especially if it's not your teaching area. Identify the test dates, because the GED probably has-- there are different test centers that have a schedule of dates. So helping students select the specific date that they're going to take that test. Provide a sample. So there are probably some online samples of GED math questions that you could point the student to.

Practice tests that would help identify the areas that the student needs to focus on. Decide between GED, HiSET, and TASC. OK, so this is wonderful. Now, if you were the actual GED math teacher, I suppose you could include in the goal plan that the student could study with some supplemental study materials or websites. Maybe the student could make a personal contract to study 30 minutes a day, or spend one hour per week doing practice questions.

You mentioned counseling. If your agency has a tutoring center, perhaps that could be one of the steps, to visit the tutoring center after every class for a few minutes to clear up any doubts about the homework. Visit the instructor and have a discussion. See if the instructor could tell the student what specific areas he or she needs to work on. So thank you. You have identified some great ways to help this student.

Now, some of us may have this experience if we teach second-language learners. An ESL student says, I want to improve my speaking for English. That's my goal. What kind of advice would you give or what sort of questions would you ask this student to help hone in on a more measurable, specific goal? What could you ask? What's a question that comes to mind that you could ask this student?

How are you going to practice? I see a couple more typing in. What specific areas? So yeah, speaking could include fluency or pronunciation. Yes. OK, so I think in this case, where the goal is so broad, we can ask, well, what is something you enjoy doing? Are you able to communicate in that activity?

We could ask, where do you see yourself one year from now? Oh, you're going to be looking for a job. So let's get you some vocabulary and speaking practice for the workplace. What program have you been using? What will you do after you-- thank you. Exactly, Denise. What will you do after your English has gotten to the level where you feel that you have improved?

So we need to do some questioning when this sort of goal is what the student brings to us. We need to help them make it more specific. So yes, again, tell me more. For a job or degree? What areas in your community do you need to speak English? So there are many different questions we could ask.

So moving on to step number four, setting goals is so important. But we also need to make students understand that what we're teaching them is helping them to reach their goals. So we need to help students find value. What is value? Value is a learner's belief that a domain or task is enjoyable and that it is intrinsically interesting, useful, and important to one's identification or sense of self.

So this is relating to clarity of purpose. Once we have our students set goals, we can tailor-- and actually, we should tailor-- our instruction to meeting their needs. But we need to also ensure that they understand how the education we are providing them can help them achieve their goals. So what we can do to encourage persistence is being very explicit with our students. Telling them why they're learning about fractions and how that helps them to meet their goal. Tell them why we're having them do an oral presentation and how that helps them towards their goal.

So basically, we need to make our instruction goal-oriented related to our students' goals, because if not, if students cannot find the value of our courses, well, we know that our adult students are sometimes parents, employees. They have many different roles in their communities and in their lives. So the time that they need to spend fulfilling their duties in those different roles, we know that competes with the time they need to spend in our classes.

So if students do not clearly see the value in our courses, what happens is what we often say, adult students vote with their feet. They're not understanding why we're teaching them what they're learning. Then they don't see the value. They're not as motivated because they don't see how it relates to their goals. And they often quit. So you can see that value is vital for persistence in adult education.

So what do we do to ensure that our instruction meets students' needs and goals? The first important step is getting to know our students, so beyond first and last name. Getting to know our students, finding out what their goals are, as we already discussed, and then diagnosing what their needs are. Then we can make better decisions about how and what we teach in order for our instruction to fill the gaps. What are the gaps? The gaps between where the students are now and where they want to be.

Also, I'm sure you have experienced that relationship students have with their teacher can often be motivating for the students and can be a factor in their persistence. So that has to do with getting to know them, and letting them get to know us a little, as well. How do you get to know your students? What do you do, or what do you have to do, so that you can learn more about their backgrounds and needs, and provide them instruction, and help them see value in the instruction you're providing?

Go ahead and type anything that comes to mind that answers this question. How do you get to know your students? It can be very simple. Yes, so you have introductions. Interview each other. Introduce to the class. Sarah says, when everyone is on a different level, that is difficult. Icebreakers. Marsha says, ask what is exciting about this class. What are you worried about?

Again, introducing through icebreakers. Pre and post-conferences. So while ice breakers and whole-class activities really helped create that comfortable environment, sitting down for a quick face-to-face with a student through a conference could also be very effective. If we don't do that, sometimes, the students go through our entire course and we don't even find out what they want to do next until the end. We need to find out much sooner what they plan to do with the information that we're teaching them.

Chat with them throughout the semester, yes. So of course, learn students' names on the first day of class. Do you ever have a class intake form? I have my students' emails even before my class starts, and I send out a Google form to find out what I can about them before they even show up at my class. Now, that may not be possible for you, but it's been effective for me.

You can simply ask students what they're interested in or what they feel bored about. Of course, ask them why they're taking the class. That's when they're setting their goals. You're finding that out.

Teachers model first by sharing their own backgrounds and struggles. I'm so happy you said that. We're going to be coming back to that in a moment. Sometimes, we're the models, and if we've got university degrees, the students cannot relate with us. But if we share our struggles and a little bit about our own backgrounds, students will feel more motivated to see there's my teacher. My teacher was going through something similar as I did.

I stay in the classroom during my break and students chat with me, and I get to know them a lot better that way. You might have students write a letter of introduction to you at the beginning of class. You may also give students more chances to talk, so reducing the teacher talk. A lot of teachers use social media. Maybe they have a private Facebook group and they get to know students that way.

I always show up about 30 minutes before my class starts so I'm in the classroom. But maybe you have office hours, or you provide specific times where students can come and talk to you outside of class time. Questionnaires, surveys, exit tickets, conferences. There's so many different ways that we can get to know our students, but it's vital that we do this from the beginning.

So a few more things about finding value before we move on. As I said, be deliberate, explicit, indirect. Stress that the content is relevant. The content that you're teaching is connected to students' needs and goals. I imagine you start each class with an agenda. Maybe on the board you write what students are going to do. But we should also have an objective listed for each day. So by the end of today's class, you will have learned, or you will have practiced, or improved this skill.

Regularly ask and tell students why they are learning and practicing something in class, and how this learning applies to their needs, goals, and lives. When I can, I bring students' experiences into the classroom. So right now, I have a couple of doctors in my classroom. And so whenever I can, I get their perspective as medical professionals, and they love sharing that. When we can, we should personalize and customize class lessons and materials.

Again, to ensure that our instruction has value, we do the goal-setting with students. We revisit the goal statements. We should ask students for feedback. This can come in the form of an exit ticket after every class or a certain class, a midterm evaluation or survey about the class, and at the end of the course, as well, is a good time to ask students, what helped you most in this class?

So being really open to their suggestions. They love that, when you do an exit ticket and they tell you, I need more practice with this, and the next day you deliver. That's going to keep our students coming back to our classes and persisting, despite whatever other barriers they may be facing.

Step number five, another strategy, scaffold lessons with review and cycling of content. So what does that mean, scaffolding? Can you provide your definition of scaffolding? Or maybe you have an example that you could provide from some recent teaching you have done. If you can go ahead and share in the Chat pod, what does it mean to scaffold our lessons?

It seems like folks are a little bit nervous. I'm sure you know what it means, but to define can be a little bit challenging. Yes, Andrea, provide support. Build upon one other. Structured support. Yes. So if we're teaching something that's going to be very challenging, we're dividing it up into smaller chunks so that students will feel more successful than just throwing out difficult content without building a foundation.

So that can overwhelm students, and make them frustrated, and actually have negative effects on persistence when we assign something that's so complex without the scaffolding. So again, we're having little mini lessons that are leading up to the big thing, basically is what scaffolding is.

Then if I'm teaching a vocabulary word, if I just teach it once and we never look at it again, the chances that the student is going to retain the meaning of that vocabulary word, not so high. So we need to bring back, cycle back the content when we can.

Moving on to strategy number six, we're teaching adults. We should provide adults with choice and opportunities to practice autonomy. What does this mean? Well, there is some research behind this. A study by the New England Adult Learner Persistence Project shows that providing opportunities for students to be included in the decision-making has a positive outcome on persistence.

So our classes can be more appealing and engaging when students have a chance to do what they think they are good at doing. How does that happen? Again, we can provide choices for some of the class content, and we can provide choices for how students can demonstrate their learning with different assignment options. When we give students options for how they demonstrate their learning, then they're self-directed and more engaged.

We are showing students, by offering choice and autonomy, that individual differences are recognized and respected. And by doing that, we create these conditions in which students naturally become more motivated. And of course, greater motivation, when intrinsic, can correlate with better persistence.

Can you think of anything that you do routinely or something that you have done recently in which you've provided students with choice and/or autonomy in your class? What was it?

Thank you, Shawnee. Allowing students to pick which subjects they want to start working on. Can you elaborate on that, like give the example, which subject? Lucia, ask students whether they wanted to enroll in one or two classes for their high school diploma. Thank you, Lucia. I imagine you're a counselor, perhaps, or administrator.

OK, Andrea, you have a huge textbook. Some teachers think, I need to get through this entire textbook. But sometimes, quality is better than quantity. So giving students a chance to select which of the four of the eight lessons they get to learn. Very good. Voting, yes, instead of goat. Yes, Lucia is a counselor. Thank you.

About 30 more seconds to type in anything else. OK, thank you, Shawnee. Choosing a subject such as English, or math, or civics, and so on. So you're coming more at the counselor or administrator view, like Lucia is. Thank you. Sarah says, do you prefer book, or face-to-face learning, or online educational programs?

OK. So we're going to look at some other ways that I imagine you already incorporate different methods for providing choice and autonomy, but maybe they didn't come quickly to your mind. But you will recognize some of these, without a doubt. Here are some activities that provide choice and autonomy.

Letting students select one of two assignments. And I see Denise, this is kind of going along with the next one. Giving students a chance to either do writing or make a video for their project or for the assignment that they're demonstrating their understanding of the content with. That's a beautiful thing that you just wrote there. I love that. Some students are strong in writing and others are strong in technical skills and speaking. There would still be some writing involved in making a video.

So allowing students to pick the topic of a reading or writing assignment. Giving students the option of doing extra work online. Many schools offer self-study packets or online exercises for those that have more time. A lot of schools are offering supplemental either blended learning or partially online learning, hybrid courses where students can go at their own pace and maybe revisit the contents more than once if they need to.

Here are a few other things. Posting assignments and other materials on the class website for students to revisit. Allowing students to demonstrate learning in a variety of ways. Giving students alternative for approaches to the next topic on the syllabus. Having volunteers students lead a lesson review.

We know that there is this famous pyramid that you've maybe seen that said, at the top, when students just are listening to information, so when we're just lecturing at them, there is not a super high chance that they're going to retain that content. But as it goes down the pyramid, when they can teach it to someone else, that's when they really retain the content and show that they understand the content. So having them lead a lesson review as they feel comfortable and as you feel comfortable having them do it.

Strategy number seven, monitoring attendance and performance. So I would imagine that you have students sign in and sign out, and you're keeping track of their daily attendance that way. There is a book that I read that's very interesting, and it's called-- let me think of it for a moment-- Make It Stick. And in this book-- it's not specific to adult ed, but just learning in general.

When we give these low-stakes quizzes, we're building in the repetition, and it's helping them remember. So when you give a quiz and a student doesn't do well, you should give them the opportunity to do it again. Otherwise, let's say you give a quiz. The student gets 70%. And that's the end of that topic and we're moving on to the next unit. Then, in fact, the student is remembering 30% of the content incorrectly.

So again, that book says that-- he gives a couple of case studies where low-stakes quizzing kept students coming. The instructor who gave one midterm and one final, except for those two days, there was pretty well attendance in the class. Again, exit tickets. Hopefully all of you understand what that is, but having students write on an index card as they leave the classroom, what is a question you have about today's lesson? What is something you need more practice on? What is something you didn't understand?

Or asking them to produce something that you were teaching that day, and you can see whether they got it or not. So then going back to the next day, recovering that content that students were not so clear on. So that's dealing with their performance.

Perhaps you have a manual paper grade book. I use an online grade book that students can see how they're doing, and they can see when they're missing an assignment, and it gives them alerts when they have not taken a quiz that they need to do. So giving students access to that information, just like kids in K through 12, the parents, and once they get to high school, they can check their own grades. So adults should be able to do that, too, to see how they're progressing.

You might want to have some sort of paper in students' folders or binders in which they're marking their own attendance. So then when you get to the end of the term or semester, and they see, oh, no, they're not ready to move on. They didn't adequately perform what they needed to do, you can go back to that and show them, look, you you missed two weeks out of six. This is probably why you're not progressing.

Have students keep track of their own scores and grades on any standardized testing or any class assignments. Quarterly or midterm reports-- so either printing out from your grade book or just writing a little message to students about what they're doing well, what assignments are missing, what things they need to work on more in order to succeed in your class.

So Sonja asked, what program do you use for your online grade book? I used to use one called Engrade, E-N-G-R-A-D-E. And then students get a code, and they can go in and see their grades. Now, I'm teaching a hybrid course, so it's 25% online, and we're using Canvas. I understand that through OTAN, you can get a Moodle course for your class, and that would have a grade book, as well. So if you're in an adult ad and you're a WIOA-funded agency, you could look into that, using Moodle as an online grade book. Yes.

A couple more things about monitoring attendance and performance. Do you give an end-of-term progress report? If not, you should do that. Students really want to know what they did well, and they need that advice for what they should work on next.

There is evidence that texting students motivational messages, homework reminders, and such like that keeps the students coming to our classes. So sending emails-- a lot of the younger generation, they're more text-oriented. Calling students when they start to have irregular attendance patterns. A telephone call from their teacher always brings the student back to the class. If it doesn't, at least you know what barrier that student is having that is stopping that student from attending. So the little personal things like that mean a lot.

Of course, anytime we can instill pride and build our student's confidence by displaying their works, whether through portfolios or online electronic portfolios, or having maybe a graduation at the end where they make a speech or something like that.

And I think a lot of agencies do this. We really hype the perfect attendance. So we have publishers textbooks that are sent to our agency that no teachers really want. We give those away as gifts for perfect attendance, and the student gets a certificate, and we make a big deal out of that if students have perfect attendance.

Can you imagine yourself-- maybe you have a family. Of course, you have a job. But if you had a couple of part-time jobs, coming to class every class period is something that should be celebrated. Sarah says, incentive for hours spent in class. Definitely, whatever incentive you can come up with.

So strategy number eight. Kind of mentioned that previously. Have constant and continuous communication. Send messages-- texts, emails-- regularly. Remind is a great free program that you can use, and then you don't need to give out your own personal cell phone number. It creates a number for you, and you can send out bulk text messages all at once.

So I am a little old-fashioned. I'm still doing email. But I send homework reminders, words of encouragement. Whenever I see something, maybe a video on YouTube or something in the news that is related to something we had been discussing in class, I send that. So students are receiving, from me, a couple of emails a week, actually.

So you might want to then check in and say, is that helping you? If they're not even reading it, then that's extra work for you. But there is the study that I mentioned that multiple texts sent throughout the term that really targeted specific barriers that students had in that specific adult education school, things like lack of social support networks, lack of positive feedback and encouragement in planning problems.

This study that they did really showed that regular messages to students-- the result was 36% fewer students dropped. 36%, that's a lot. And there was a 7% increase in average attendance. Something so simple. This is actually the study called "Curbing Adult Student Attrition, Evidence From a Field Experiment." It was conducted in 2015, and it's from Harvard Business School. So I believe we have the link in the handout.

But in the experiment, again, multiple messages and prompts were sent by the college via text so that students received messages throughout the term. And great results. So I think that something so simple that we could do with our own students, but maybe we'd want to explore this even as an agency, a way that you could be sending these encouraging messages to students to help them persist.

Now, sometimes teachers say, well, my students, their technical skills are not so great. But if you are we are WIOA-funded agency, every spring, I believe it is, your students, a select group, can be-- it has to be 10% of the agency's students. They take this survey, and it's part of the Tech and Distance Learning Plan that your agency submits for OTAN.

And these were the results in 2017-'18. As you can see, 46,000 students have smartphones. This number used to be a lot lower. It looks like only 10% said no. Do you text on your phone? 91% of the students who took that survey said yes, they do texting. There were other ways that students communicate with their teachers, as you can see.

So it looks like some teachers are calling their students or students are calling perhaps and leaving messages for teachers-- 35%. 55% are emailing. 12% use Facebook or other social media to connect the class, the students together and the students with the teacher. Online courses, like Moodle or Edmodo, only 5%. 38% are texting by phone.

So I don't think the excuse the students don't know the technology or wouldn't check their texts, that's just not accurate anymore. Our students-- it looks like the digital divide that was there for a long time is narrowing. So we might as well use these resources to encourage our students to persist.

So what you will see in just a moment are two Chat pods. This is about levering technology. First, do you use social media or texting to connect students with you and with each other outside of class time? Or maybe you use some sort of learning management system, like Moodle. Maybe you do that online. What technology do you use to communicate with students? Are there other ways you leverage technology to encourage attendance, persistence, and try to boost students' motivation?

So you see the two Chat pods. Go ahead and type in anything that you have been doing to take advantage of technology for connecting with your students, encouraging them to stay in the classes. So Remind is very popular. Yes, so Marta, Remind. There are others. I believe there's another that has special pricing for large school districts, but the name doesn't come to my mind right away.

So Michelle sets up Remind classes for certain cohorts-- for a group who wants to know more about neighboring colleges, for example. That's wonderful. Email groups, primarily email. Email with support materials and websites. I don't see anybody using Facebook yet. Jane-- I'm sorry. I don't know if it's Jane or Janie-- but you just started using Moodle, and Google Classroom can be useful for students' questions and discussions. Marta-- her college is looking into Signal Vine-- I think that's the one I heard of, yes-- as a tool to communicate with students.

If you have access to any LMS, Learning Management System, like Moodle, Google Classroom, Edmodo, any of those, something that I found very successful-- I have to be very specific in laying out the expectations of students. But during the week I'm teaching them something, over the weekend, they need to go online to, in this case, Canvas, and contribute to a discussion forum.

I have a rubric that says, you post your own answers to the questions by Friday at midnight. Before class time on Monday, you need to respond to two other classmates. It's incredible. Those discussion boards get so long. There's so much conversation happening. And it makes me feel so good when the students are keeping contact with each other outside of class time. So then when they come back together Monday, they've learned new things about each other.

An important thing to remember-- and it is one of the principles of good online teaching, actually-- is that the instructor does need to be present. So I go in there. I ask questions. I model what is expected, as far as responses to other students. So things to think about. Students have the technology. We should leverage that technology to help them persist in our classes.

And we come to the final five minutes of our webinar today. Number nine. This strategy is about providing opportunities for reflection and feedback. So we, as teachers, should reflect. After class, when I'm driving home, I'm thinking about my lesson-- what went well, what totally failed, and how I would approach it differently in the future.

And we should have students reflect similarly on their own learning. It could be something as simple as a checklist, or rating their skills or their understanding on a rating scale. For ESL language learners, it can be "I can" statements. We can use classroom assessment techniques. I think it was Angelo and Cross, they wrote a book quite a few years back, and it has all kinds of ideas for how you can do formative assessment, and you can check-in with students to see if they're getting what you're teaching.

Getting-- not just giving, but receiving from your students-- midterm feedback. What is helping you most in the class? What is not helping you very much? What would you like to do more in the class? Getting that feedback from students in the middle of your term, as well as at the end as you prepare for the next time you teach that class, really helps you.

Students can give really good feedback that, at first, it may sting. It may feel a little bit hurtful when they're telling us some suggestions. But when you step back and look at it, they are right on, usually, about what could be improved in our teaching.

So as we finish up, we have three minutes. What is one new thing that you're going to try? What is your takeaway? Or did something spark an idea in your mind? Maybe you did something in the past and you haven't done it in a while, and you're going to bring it back. What is one thing you're going to do to encourage student participation in your class? persistence? maybe increase their motivation?