“As a classroom teacher, picture that one student who, for whatever reason, you just weren’t quite able to reach…because you had 42 other students in the classroom that you were trying to manage. Picture that one student who, for whatever reason, wasn’t fully able to engage in that classroom environment…and then picture how you would be able to serve them in an online environment like here at Primavera, where they are able to get more personalized attention from you.”
It’s well-known that Primavera hires excellent teachers. As our website details, our teachers are highly qualified, state certified, well-educated (more than 85% hold a master’s degree or higher), and they continually hone their skills through ongoing professional training.
It’s also well-known that we recognize the excellence of our teachers through their compensation. With an average salary of $53,443 (up over 10% from the previous year), they earn 6% more than the statewide average.
What receives less attention are the motivations that animate our instructors’ excellence and in turn their impact on our diverse student body — many of whom face significant challenges in completing high school.
As it turns out, the single greatest motivation is the freedom to teach.
In a previous story, we introduced you to Ramesh Joshi, a Primavera faculty member who has been repeatedly recognized for his excellence in teaching. In that story, Mr. Joshi talked about adapting the virtual classroom model to his teaching style, and the sense of fulfillment he and his students have experienced as a result. In visiting our website pages devoted to our faculty, you’ll see the stories of many other dedicated educators whose philosophies and experiences involving online teaching mirror those of Mr. Joshi. Throughout their profiles, you’ll discover many of the motivations they share. These motivations help explain their passion as teachers as well as their dedication to teaching at Primavera.
Meeting Students Where They Live
“I think it’s pretty well known that if you’re working in education today, you’re working with digital age learners. These are kids who have never had to live without access to a smart phone or a tablet.”
We often refer to our students as “digital natives,” and this description goes far beyond cliché. The fact is that our students are not simply more comfortable than their parents’ generation in going “online” for information and entertainment (not to mention social interaction), they often perform better in a virtual classroom than in a brick and mortar one. Whether the issue is relative anonymity in asking questions and seeking help, or the interactive nature of our online curricula, our teachers appreciate the comfort their students feel in an online environment.
Professional Collaboration
“Collaboration is much more common here.”
Teachers inherently understand the adage, “It takes a village,” and Primavera Online High School provides an ideal environment for our educators to interact and compare their experiences with our proprietary curriculum and the most effective ways to teach to it. While every instructor enjoys their own dedicated workspace, the design and layout of our facility puts them in easy proximity in ways that go far beyond the traditional “teachers’ break room” associated with brick and mortar schools. This unique and dynamic design also enhances the quality of their daily work life.
Challenging Rather Than Enabling
“Primavera challenges students to be more independent and to set their own schedules, set their own pace, and get the work done.”
Longtime educators appreciate that one of the most important things they can teach their students is how to become effective learners — and an important component of successful learning is taking responsibility for the process. Our unique software helps make this possible by enabling students to manage homework assignments and track their academic progress. This online environment also stretches our teachers’ skill sets and improves adaptability. In the words of one teacher, “We serve everyone from the neediest academically to students who want to get ahead or have more time to focus on their interests. I feel it uses all of my talents so that I can teach at a very high level, or a very low level, to help everyone succeed.”
Structured Curricula
“In our setting, we have the ability to improve our curriculum over and over again.”
Primavera’s online core curricula development, developed and provided by our ed tech partner StrongMind, is also a powerful tool designed to remove or simplify much of the burden of lesson planning from our instructors. This is important, as such innovations and automations are designed to empower teachers to instead focus their talents and energy on enhancing their instruction. But the benefits of this model go far beyond “what” we teach and extend to high-quality assessment of student learning delivered by Galileo K-12 Online — an external provider used to validate student learning and academic efficacy. Primavera’s courses deliver advanced analytics that empower teachers with real-time data so they can provide individualized instruction and support when and where students need it most.
Educating Rather Than Managing a Classroom
“There is no hiding in an online classroom.”
Ask teachers what they enjoy most about teaching, and they are likely to include the dynamics of the classroom environment. Ask them what they least enjoy, and they are likely to give the same answer; managing the classroom. Classroom management can be both a delight and a frustration. We’ve designed our online learning experience at Primavera to emphasize the former and diminish the latter. The dynamic is not “one-to-many” but “one-to-one simultaneously.” In every online class, students can engage directly and immediately with an instructor during the course of a lesson, all while instructors enjoy the freedom to integrate their personal communications styles into the class session. Take the instructor who notes, “I play music while my students are working…and sometimes we talk about the music, and that makes it more fun.”
Personal Impact
“My interactions with my students are far more personal than when I was managing a classroom of 41. And the quality of that interaction is priceless.”
While every member of Primavera’s faculty cherishes the freedom to teach, they cherish even more the reason they chose to teach to begin with: the opportunity to positively shape the lives of young people. After all, any of our students could be our own sons or daughters. And while the conventional wisdom — at least among non-digital natives — is that an online classroom setting is inherently more impersonal, the experiences of our teachers and students proves otherwise. Quoting again from Mr. Joshi, “My students frequently tell me that they are getting better personalized learning at Primavera than they received at their brick and mortar schools. Here they can walk into a virtual classroom without any fear of anybody listening in on their questions. They can be getting one-on-one help.”
Great teachers do more than educate…they advocate for learning. And whether it’s because the digital natives that fill our “classrooms” are more comfortable typing out a text message than talking into a phone, or because our software technology enables our students to feel more engaged, our teachers know they are making a difference in their lives — and virtually all of them share the same story, told in slightly different ways: “Students have told me that they don’t know what they would have done without Primavera.”
