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An unprecedented pandemic may change the definition of classroom, but it doesn't change the definition of good teaching. For those who want a primer for online teaching, it's time to answer your biggest questions about remote, digitally based instruction:
- How do I build and nurture relationships with students and their at-home adults from afar?
- How do I adapt my best teaching to an online setting?
- How do I keep a focus on students and their needs when they aren't in front of me?
Jennifer Serravallo's Connecting with Students Online gives you concise, doable answers based on her own experiences and those of the teachers, administrators, and coaches she communicated with during the pandemic. Focusing on the vital importance of the teacher-student connection, Jen guides you to:
- effectively prioritize what matters most during remote, online instruction
- schedule your day and your students' to maximize teaching and learning (and avoid burnout)
- streamline curricular units and roll them out digitally
- record highly engaging short lessons that students will enjoy and learn from
- confer, working with small groups, and drive learning through independent practice
- partner with the adults in a student's home to support your work with their child.
Featuring simplified, commonsense suggestions, 55 step-by-step teaching strategies, and video examples of Jen conferring and working with small groups, Connecting with Students Online helps new teachers, teachers new to technology, or anyone who wants to better understand the essence of effective online instruction. Along the way Jen addresses crucial topics including assessment and progress monitoring, student engagement and accountability, using anchor charts and visuals, getting books into students' hands, teaching subject-area content, and avoiding teacher burnout.
No matter when or why you need a primer for online instruction,
Connecting with Students Online can help.
Jen will be donating a portion of the proceeds from Connecting with Students Online
to organizations that help children directly impacted by COVID-19.
Jennifer Serravallo is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning educator, literacy consultant, frequent speaker at state and national conferences, and former member of the Parents Magazine editorial board. In 2023, she launched her podcast To the Classroom: Conversations with Researchers and Educators. Jen is best known for creating books and resources rooted in research that help make responsive, strategic, differentiated literacy instruction possible for all teachers.
Her newest books are THE READING STRATEGIES BOOK 2.0 (2023), TEACHING WRITING IN SMALL GROUPS (March 2021), A TEACHER'S GUIDE TO READING CONFERENCES (2019), and UNDERSTANDING TEXTS AND READERS (2018). Her books and resources are used around the world: THE WRITING STRATEGIES BOOK (2017) and THE READING STRATEGIES BOOK (1st edition) (2015) have have been translated into French, Chinese, and Spanish.
Her comprehension assessment and teaching resources, COMPLETE COMPREHENSION: FICTION and COMPLETE COMPREHENSION: NONFICTION, help teachers make sense of comprehension, especially in whole chapter books and book-length nonfiction texts. They were released in Spring 2019 and are available through Heinemann (Learn more: hein.pub/cc).
Jen holds a BA from Vassar College and an MA from Teachers College, where she has also taught graduate and undergraduate classes.
Follow Jen on Twitter (@jserravallo) and Instagram (@jenniferserravallo), learn more from her website/blog: and join the Literacy Strategies Facebook Community.