Virtual Pods: Supporting Student Wellbeing with School Volunteers during Distance Learning

How we prototyped a “virtual pod” program to help students struggling with online learning.

In a normal school year (my 7-year old refers to such times as “BC” — “Before Corona”), volunteers play a critical role in any school — they provide academic support for students, help teachers scale their learning efforts, act as mentors, and generally provide a needed extra set of hands.

As the school year was about to kick off in August, we wanted to see if we could reintroduce some aspects of our school volunteer program, with the goal of providing extra support for students who are struggling with online school.

Creating a Program for Everyone

It was important that we implemented a program that would work for families, volunteers, and teachers. We wanted something that was really going to help struggling students, while not adding to “zoom fatigue”. Based on interviews with families, teachers and volunteers, these were the must-haves:

• Teachers: sharply limit any extra work for teachers, academics are tied into what was covered in class, ensure equitable access for all students
• Parents: make it fun for the students, have it during the official school day
• Volunteers: doesn’t require a lot of prep on academic subjects, easy to manage over zoom
• School District: a district employee or teacher legally must have oversight and the ability to monitor interactions during the sessions

Based on this feedback, we came up with a virtual pod slot during the last hour of the school day. Twice a week, the students and volunteers would log into a zoom session and the Program Coordinator would put the students into small breakout groups of 3 with their volunteers.

The pod format had the students walk through their homework with the volunteer and then dive into some fun activities of their choosing. We saw early on that the students were jumping in to help each other with homework on the call. One pod decided to learn sign language!

Some Lessons Learned

Want to try this at your school? Some tips based on our experience:

1. Identify your target student population, but don’t be afraid to adjust. Initially, we designed the program for the most in-need students, but we realized from some early feedback from teachers, parents, and volunteers that these kids already had more “zoom time” than most of the students and they were harder for a volunteer to support online. We shifted our focus to students who needed some extra support or more opportunities to socialize, freeing up teacher time to focus on the most at-risk students.
2. Find a great partner to recruit volunteers. We were incredibly fortunate to have the support of Duffy Ross from Berkeley Schools Volunteers. She was able to work through the logistics on the volunteer side and make sure we were complying with the local school board requirements.
3. Get your PTA to fund a Program Coordinator. Running a program takes time. We were able to get funding from the Emerson PTA to pay one of our amazing 4th grade teachers to coordinate the volunteers and work with the families and teachers. Ms. Totten had a similar role working with volunteers onsite, so she brought the right set of skills to the team.
4. Partner with your teachers on the program. We decided early on to design the program with Ms. Totten and some of the other teachers. They were able to give us rapid feedback on what would work and help recruit the students and families who could really benefit from the virtual pods. We also got approval from our Principal to have the pods during the school day.
5. Pilot before you scale. One of the best decisions we made was to do a small pilot with the 4th grade for a few weeks before opening up to other grades. This gave us time to work out the logistics and make sure the format was engaging for the students and easy for the volunteers to execute. This made the broader rollout much smoother.

Interested in learning more about our approach? We would love to hear from you at mcplunk@gmail.com or j@prototypethinking.io.