Erika Greene, a health science teacher at Meadowcreek High School in Georgia, knows this first-hand. She spent her lunches and free time going above and beyond for students who needed a little extra boost.
When Erika first started at Meadowcreek High School, she needed more time to help her students succeed. Then, she found HealthCenter21.
Erika originally picked up HealthCenter21 to teach a variety of health science courses.
As she used it, she discovered it let her streamline a higher level of student engagement.
This is how she made it happen.
Erika’s Problem: Remediation Took Too Much Time
Like many CTE teachers, Erika spent a lot of her free time on remediating students.
She spent 10 to 15 hours each week working with individual students to help them keep up with the rest of her class.
That may seem like a lot, even for a full-time teacher. But for Erika, it was essential.
“It is necessary we provide our students safety nets to give them the opportunity to master the subject” Erika says.
Because Erika wants her students to succeed, she would often use planning periods afterschool sessions for student remediation.
“I had to allow students to retake tests and they would have to stay after school to do it. I had to use my planning period for a student to come in and retake a test or allow them to turn in work they missed. It was extra work for me.”
But Erika didn’t complain about the extra work. In fact, she embraced it. With 14 years under her belt as a physician’s assistant, she understood that teaching would bring new goals and challenges.
“I think what’s important about teaching is real world experience. Get the kids out of these four walls, get them into productive programs where they can shadow individuals in the health care field, and get internships set up for them.”
That’s a tall order for any teacher. Unfortunately, student remediation forced a lot of Erika’s students to stay in the classroom so she could hand-administer make-up work herself.
That’s when Erika started looking for a solution online. Her search led her to HealthCenter21, which she hoped would help with her in-class teaching.
But Erika quickly learned she could use HealthCenter21 for more than just the classroom – she could help students without losing hours of free time every day.
How Erika Uses HealthCenter21 for Remediation
When Erika found HealthCenter21, she quickly discovered its versatility for students.
With it, her students could work outside of the classroom. That means Erika no longer spends her planning periods and lunch administering make-up work.
In that regard, HealthCenter21 lets Erika meet the high standards of her administration. HealthCenter21’s flexibility means every student can easily make up missed work, which takes the pressure off of remediation.
In that time, Erika has helped more students pass her classes without losing all of her personal time to remediation. Instead, the at-home assignments and online assessments from HealthCenter21 let students learn, test, and review everything they need on their own.
Streamlining remediation is just one of HealthCenter21’s benefits, though. Erika also discovered the program works exceptionally well for engaging her students.
Engaging Students Beyond Remediation
HealthCenter21 didn’t just help Erika streamline remediation activities. It also helped her reduce the number of students who needed remediation in the first place and focus more on student enrichment!
Erika keeps students engaged with presentation-style lessons in her classroom. She projects HealthCenter21 onto a screen at the front of her class, and she selects a student to go through the interactive lesson on the screen.
“Even when I’m lecturing from the system, I’ll choose a student to come up and go through the lesson that they like.”
Erika also encourages students to complete work in HealthCenter21 on their own.
This self-directed learning empowers students to get work done at their own pace so they can learn and retain information over the long run.
“The other day I said ‘Do you want me to lecture or do you want to get the laptops and do HealthCenter21?’ They said they wanted to do it on their own, so they got the laptops. They’re working by themselves... that’s a good way for them to be engaged.”
Erika has also discovered that students are far more interested in HealthCenter21 as a digital curriculum than they ever were with a textbook.
Erika credits this to the fact that HealthCenter21 is online, which means it’s constantly up-to-date.
But textbooks are old news. Worse yet, they’re out of date the moment they’re published.
HealthCenter21 fixes both of those problems at the same time.
“HealthCenter21 is a good resource for someone who is new to teaching because what’s out there is old from my viewpoint. Health care is changing all the time. It’s not stagnant. So what I was using before HealthCenter21 was just boring and old.”
Aside from the worn-out notion of textbooks, Erika also recognizes that students prefer to spend their time online these days. HealthCenter21 lets them indulge that preference.
“To me, HealthCenter21 is more current and more where the students are now,” Erika says. “They want us to use more technology in the classroom and this program helps to do that.”
With one simple solution, Erika has streamlined her classroom to reduce the number of students in remediation while helping them learn at the same time, and spend more of her instructional planning on enrichment activities for her students.
