Teacher Shortages | Special Populations | Summer School | Credit Recovery | Homeschool Alternatives
Virtual Learning Expands Choices and Opportunities
Teacher Shortages are Solved with Pearson’s Talented Online Instructors
This school year has been impacted by an unprecedented shortage of teachers, and district administrators are struggling to provide an uninterrupted learning environment for their students. Pearson can help by delivering a virtual or blended program through our all-in-one learning management system, using our certified instructors to address teacher shortages.
Pearson provides online learning solutions during the school year and for summer school, including K-12 courses with state-certified* teachers, live tutoring, and an embedded, live virtual classroom. Our highly qualified, content-certified teachers offer opportunities for synchronous engagement for hundreds of K-12 state-aligned courses, including core, electives, GT, world languages, CTE, honors, and AP®.
Plus:
- All teachers host drop-in office hours for students at least three hours a week
- Students may schedule a 1:1 appointment with a teacher for individual instruction
- Teachers connect with students to ensure they are progressing through the course
- Teachers grade assignments/portfolios and assign a final grade
Pearson can ensure your students don’t lose valuable learning opportunities because of a shortage of teachers.
*Pearson offers state-certified teachers in the following states: Alabama (AL), Arkansas (AR), California (CA), Colorado (CO), Florida (FL), Georgia (GA), Indiana (IN), Massachusetts (MA), Michigan (MI), Minnesota (MN), Missouri (MO), Mississippi (MS), Ohio (OH), Oklahoma (OK), Oregon (OR), Pennsylvania (PA), South Carolina (SC), Tennessee (TN), Texas (TX), Virginia (VA), Washington (WA), and Wisconsin (WI).
Empower Your Gifted Students and Students with Special Needs to Succeed
Is your district struggling to meet the needs of special populations? We can help. At Pearson Virtual Schools, we know that students with unique learning requirements can thrive in a virtual environment. Pearson has decades of demonstrated success in supporting the individualized needs of special populations in education, including those with IEPs and 504 plans – as well as gifted students.
Pearson provides students with Individualized Education Plans, a personalized academic experience tailored to their individual learning styles. Here’s how Pearson’s virtual education model enables special populations students to achieve success:
- Learning is a personalized experience, with the ability to provide a customized curriculum designed to meet each student’s individual needs.
- Highly qualified teachers prioritize communication and offer phone calls, WebMails, and one-on-one drop-in sessions as needed.
- A virtual environment removes the anxieties and distractions of a typical classroom so students can focus on learning.
- While parental involvement may be limited in-classroom, parents of students with special needs can be hands-on with their child’s education in a virtual setting.
- Pearson provides gifted students with a robust honors and AP course catalog and self-paced learning, which are often limited in a brick-and-mortar school.
- Pearson’s experienced special populations team partners with districts for frequent communication and collaboration to ensure each special populations student thrives.
Your Summer School Program Can Give Students Freedom and Flexibility
Summer school programs can be so much more than high school credit recovery. When you partner with Pearson, your district can offer an innovative summer school option that allows your students to stay academically engaged while still enjoying the freedom of summer. Pearson Virtual Schools enables districts to provide an engaging, flexible, and affordable summer school program to meet the needs of K-12 students. With rolling start and end dates, Pearson's online summer school courses can accommodate your district's summer schedule.
Online Summer School Students Can Explore New Interests and Build New Skills
With more than 100 different online courses to choose from, a Pearson summer school solution can fit every student's needs. Whether you have high school seniors needing math credits for graduation or parents seeking a summer enrichment activity for their kindergartner, our summer school programs can help.
- Original credit courses help students satisfy graduation requirements, explore their interests, or accelerate their academic progress.
- High school credit recovery courses are standards-based courses designed to support students in the mastery of essential objectives and the recovery of required credits. A pre-test allows for the development of a personalized prescriptive pathway down to the objective level, prescribing what the student has not mastered.
- High school honors and Advanced Placement® courses in Grades 9–12 provide students with rigorous assignments for enrichment, honors, and AP credits.
- Elementary and middle school courses offer younger students the opportunity to explore career interests, learn English or math core concepts, or study a new language.
- Expand your elementary and middle school students’ skills through a Summer Smarts program.
- Pearson offers NCAA-approved courses, allowing college-bound student-athletes to build a foundation of high school courses to prepare them for the academic expectations in college.
Explore Summer School Programs
Credit Recovery That Is Flexible, Affordable, and Convenient
Allowing students to retake courses required for graduation when their previous attempts have been unsuccessful is critical not only for improving your district's overall graduation rate, but more importantly, for helping your students secure better opportunities for their futures. Failure to complete high school is directly correlated with reduced employment opportunities, relegation to low-skill and low-paying positions, and diminished intergeneration upward mobility.
Programs designed to make up missed credits offered through your district can ensure students not only complete their high school requirements, but also provide the opportunity to avoid a delay to a student's graduation.
While the benefits of credit recovery are evident, school leaders face the challenge of meeting these needs in their districts, which is no small challenge. Best practices show that simply offering a credit make-up program will help to bolster overall graduation rates, but not all programs are created equal. When and how the recovery of credits is offered can create opportunity gaps among students. Creating a program that supports meaningful student success involves a flexible and convenient solution while maintaining the quality of the curriculum and student support.
Through Pearson District Partnerships, you can tailor a solution for credit recovery that meets the needs of your district’s students, giving them every opportunity to overcome setbacks and succeed. With prescriptive credit recovery courses, you can:
- Provide a personalized learning path for every student that fits any learning style.
- Save teachers time with a system that automatically assigns content based on objectives yet to be mastered during the pre-assessment.
- Realize return on instruction by re-engaging dropouts and increasing graduation rates.
- Get students excited about learning with interactive and engaging courses where they control the time, place, and pace in a virtual high school setting.
- Help students make up credits and graduate on time with their peers.
Standards-Based Prescriptive Courses
Use tried-and-true online courses to help get high-school students back on track. Pearson offers proven virtual high school online courses at various levels. These courses are designed to support student mastery of essential objectives and recovery of required credits based on personalized results of a pre-test.
Learning Supported by Pearson Connexus
Support your students in the recovery of their lost credits with a combination of the best features of a learning management system and practical communications tools for a rich, vibrant virtual high school classroom experience that allows students, parents, and teachers to collaborate successfully 24 hours a day from any Internet connection. Leverage teacher features like assessment tools, automatic grading, and reporting to make managing students easy and ensure students stay on track with a student dashboard that summarizes courses, progress, to-dos, activities, and teacher announcements.
Pearson District Partnerships can support your efforts to ensure that all students in your district have every opportunity to overcome barriers to graduation and their future success. Our team can work with you to tailor a flexible online program that creates opportunities for underserved or struggling students in your district to recover the credit they need to graduate. Pearson programs follow best practices offering high-quality, well-structured curriculum with flexible pacing, ample feedback, assistance as needed, and teaching adapted to a student's learning style.
